


we could be immortals

by lilaliacs



Category: Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Big Hero 6 AU, Gen, Woojin centric, minhyun is a robot, nielsung and woojin are a Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 07:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15747258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilaliacs/pseuds/lilaliacs
Summary: Jaehwan cut in: “Guys, do you know what this is? Do you understand what is literally happening right now?”Everyone turned to him, question evident in their eyes, as was a little annoyance.“This is the climax of our superhero origin story.” Jaehwan continued, his eyes shining with excitement.





	we could be immortals

**Author's Note:**

> some disclaimers before you start reading:  
> -this follows the plot of bh6, casting wise it's very close. their 'powers' are exactly the same as their movie-counterparts except for woojin/hiro!  
> -i made alterations to the plot, subtle in some parts, very grave in others, especially towards the end  
> -maknae line are all aged down roughly 2 years in this, hyung line is their actual ages (as in the age difference between woojin and daniel is 5 years instead of 3)  
> -i know nothing about science or physics, i made all of this up as i went  
> -enjoy!! <3

**{They say we are what we are, But we don't have to be}**

In big cities there were a lot of small things. A lot of small houses leaning against each other in spaces that the skyscrapers left for them, creating a lot of small alleys that were only poorly lit by dingy street lights during the night. In those small alleys, under the yellow circles of light, small groups of people sometimes gathered, making a more or less small commotion ever so often. 

Small places in a big city weren’t places to walk around when you were 16 and on your own and it was the night, Jisung used to say, but Jisung was busy somewhere and Woojin wasn’t a child anymore, and he wasn’t technically alone, either. There were lots of people around him, some yelling, some watching, none of them paying attention to him. 

The company of strangers doesn’t really count as company you should feel safe in, a voice in his head spoke up. This time it sounded less like Jisung and more like Daniel, trying to sound like Jisung. He did that sometimes when he felt like he needed to pose as a good example for Woojin, because he probably thought that Jisung was the best example for everyone. 

Woojin didn’t disagree, he just really wished the two of them and their voices in his head would leave him alone sometimes. 

“This is crazy!” Someone next to him exclaimed, drowning out the imaginary well-meant nagging. 

Turning his attention back to the small area in the middle of the crowd, he found a mess of scrap metal where a not half-bad looking bot had sat before. He regretted not paying attention to how exactly it had been broken, but it wasn’t like this was the first fight he’d witnessed today, far from the first he’d witnessed in the past weeks. 

A while ago he had wondered how bot-fights had even become a thing. He figured that people had gotten tired of street fighting and actually getting hurt. That was a thing people did in the past, but now, with the possibility to have robots do everything for you that you didn’t want to do, why get your ribs broken? After some research he had found out that basically everything from back then, pre-robotics, had carried on. Bot-fighting was just as illegal, just as hard to shut down in a city like this, and just as not-PG as street fighting had been, according to one particularly informative article he’d found. 

The last part, Woojin hadn’t fully understood. A bot-fight was just like any videogame, and you weren’t really confronting the opponent physically, just their pieces of scrap metal with your pieces of scrap metal. But looking at the guy who had won the last 5 rounds Woojin had been around to see, and the group of tough looking henchmen behind him with their dark clothes and dead eyes, he guessed that former streetfighters had passed their ways down to the bot-fighting scene just as much as every other tradition to do with the craft. 

The girl who had lost the last fight was just done collecting the debris of her robot, when one of said henchmen stepped forward and cast a nearly pitying look around the crowd. 

“We have time for one last match.” He announced. “So we better make it a good one, don’t we?” 

His laugh made Woojin think that if this was some kind of science-fiction superhero story, the guy would be very fit to play a villain. 

He didn’t have time to dwell on the thought because he realized that if this was the last match it was also his last chance to challenge this guy and if he didn’t speak up soon, he would have come all this way for nothing. Lying to Jisung and Daniel for nothing felt even worse than his actual reason for lying to them. 

“I’ll try.” He blurted before he could think of anything better. A cool aloof one liner would have made a way better impression. 

The henchman eyed him and didn’t even try to hide his scornful smile. “How old are you, kid? Isn’t it way past your bed-time?” 

A few people laughed and before Woojin could say anything to defend himself, the guy spoke up again. “Get lost, if you wanna fight you have to pay.” 

“I have money.” Woojin gave back, fishing in his pockets for a few crumpled bills. Not as much as to be suspicious, but enough to pique their interest. He had figured out the right amount over the last few gatherings in back-alleys he had participated in, over other groups of gloomy looking guys belittling him. 

The man snatched the money out of his hands and rolled his eyes. “If you wanna lose your pocket money this bad…” 

He wouldn’t be losing anything, Woojin knew, but he still couldn’t help and think about what Jisung would have to say about Woojin risking the money he earned helping at Jisung’s sacred café on bot-fighting. 

Pointedly nervous and clumsy, Woojin took a few steps forward, clearing his throat and more falling than sitting down on the floor in the middle of the crowd. Winning these fights, he had learned, was just as much about acting as it was about the quality of the bots. Woojin was a terrible actor, but the fact that most opponents didn’t even think him a threat posed as a good-enough cover. 

The man he was challenging was even more intimidating than his minions. On more nights than one these past few weeks, Woojin had been thankful that streetfighting was a thing of the past. 

“Get your bots ready.” The man from earlier commanded. 

Woojin sat his bot down on the ground in front of him and only barely suppressed a smile at the snickers from the crowd. The bot looked unthreatening, more like something a small child had built than something that could last in a fight. Exactly Woojin’s intention. It was about half the size of the opponent’s, just as Woojin was only about half his opponent’s size. 

“This won’t last long.” The man chuckled darkly. Woojin silently agreed. 

“The match begins on the count of three.” One of the others cut in again. While he was counting down, a giddy sort of thrill started settling in Woojin’s chest. He’s always loved winning but winning against sketchy dudes in something that was more or less illegal just added a certain kind of thrill to it. 

“...Three!” The man yelled. 

The match didn’t last long, just as predicted earlier. Woojin had watched the fights before this one, he knew his opponent’s preferred techniques and the rhythm with which he played his attacks. It would have bored him to drag this out. If he was honest he was getting a little tired, too, and he’d have to make the whole way home as well, so he’d better get this over with quickly. 

About two minutes later he stood back up, picking his completely undamaged bot out of the pieces of his opponent’s and walking over to the side where his money as well as the rest of the cash that had been bet this evening was laying on a plate. 

“Beginner’s luck.” He mused, as he stuffed the bills into the pocket of his hoodie. “This was so much fun you guys, maybe I’ll see you around--” 

He was just about to turn away, when his huge opponent suddenly stood in front of him again. 

“Not so fast.” He growled. 

He didn’t seem to be big on words. Instead, he immediately grabbed for the robot in Woojin’s hand. 

“Weren’t you ever told that you musn’t take things that aren’t yours?” Woojin chastised before rational thought kicked in. 

The guy growled again, this time grabbing for the front of Woojin’s hoodie. He just barely dodged the meaty hand and started scrambling away. 

“Get me that robot!” The man growled to his henchmen and Woojin didn’t have to turn around to know they were coming after him. Those people took their real-life video games way too seriously. 

Woojin liked to think he knew his way around the city fairly well. He could find home from nearly anywhere and had the subway system memorised as well as the most important bus-routes. The back alleys did not belong to his personal data base yet. 

He was utterly lost only a few minutes into the chase. A chase. He was part of a literal chase in the middle of the night in a part of the city he didn’t know and nobody knew where he was. Jisung would faint if he knew about this. But Jisung didn’t know about it because he’d lied to Jisung when he left home earlier. 

He kept thinking he might be hearing the noises of the busier streets but every time he took a turn there was just more poorly lit narrow alleys and the men behind him were also still there after every corner. 

He was probably gonna be killed in one of these alleyways, ripped of all the money he just illegally won and his life and the robot he spent weeks building and Daniel and Jisung would never find out about it. That was a terrible way to die, Woojin thought, not even remotely heroic enough for his liking. It wouldn’t make a good story, and nobody would ever tell the story because nobody knew-- 

The roar of an engine cut through the sound of his thoughts and his own ragged breathing, as well as a voice and a single headlight. 

“Woojin!” 

The motorcycle came to a halt next to him with a grating screech. 

“Get on!” Daniel bellowed, and Woojin didn’t let him say it twice. It was only a matter of seconds before they took off again. 

“What are you doing out here?” Daniel called back to him, barely audible over the engine and the wind in Woojin’s ears. Before Woojin could answer anything, Daniel went on. 

“Are you hurt? Who were those guys? What do they want from you?” 

He finally made a pause, so Woojin managed to squeeze in: “My robot.” 

“Your-” Daniel cut himself off. “Woojin!” 

“What?” He yelled back, even though he knew what was coming. 

“Bot-fighting is illegal! We’ve been through this!” 

“Actually,” Woojin wasn’t sure how well his voice was carrying over to Daniel while he was clinging onto him for dear life, but he resumed anyways. “Making money from bot-fighting is illegal, not the fighting itself.” 

“Oh, and these guys were just chasing you because you were all having some chill, non-profit bot-fighting fun, that seems realistic!” Daniel yelled back. 

Woojin saw lights flash a few crossroads in front of them. “Uh, Dan,” He tried to get his attention, but Daniel wasn’t listening. 

“You sneak out of home, lie to Jisung about going to Guanlin’s place, leave us with absolutely no idea where you are in the middle of the night--” 

“Daniel.” 

“Guanlin called, you know? Two hours ago. I’ve been looking for you the entire time, I haven’t told Jisung because he would probably _die_ if he knew--” 

“ _Daniel!_ ” The flashing was unmistakably blue and red now and Woojin really thought Daniel should take literally any turn than the one he was about to take, towards the lights. 

He took the turn. 

“You can think of what to tell him when we get home. And by that I mean you better not lie to him again, we--” 

Daniel cut himself off as well as the engine as soon as he realized what he was driving towards. The road was blocked by police cars, their lights illuminating the faces of the man whose money Woojin had rightfully, but still illegally, in his pockets and the ones of his men that didn’t charge after him earlier. 

One of the officers was coming towards them, his eyes grimly fixed on the robot still clutched in Woojin’s hand. 

*** 

Jisung was leant against his car when Daniel and Woojin stepped out of the police station, but Woojin had no doubt that he’d been pacing the length of the sidewalk just seconds ago. Jisung was a pacing and freaking out kind of man, he just liked to seem collected and calm. 

The illusion lasted exactly 5 seconds of Daniel and Woojin standing in front of him and the three of them staring at each other in silence. 

“Bot-fighting.” Jisung said. Then a bit louder: “Bot-fighting! Are you serious?” He looked in between the two of them, possibly hoping for either of them to crack up a smile and say _No we’re not, just kidding, haha, surprise!_

Instead of that, Woojin murmured: “Daniel wasn’t--” 

“I don’t _care_ what Daniel did or didn’t do.” Jisung interrupted him. 

“But he didn’t--” Woojin tried again, but didn’t get any further than before. 

“Didn’t tell me where he was going and just disappeared without a word, leaving me with no idea where either of you were until the police called? Yeah. He didn’t.” 

Woojin dropped his gaze and bit his lip in defeat. Jisung never got angry at them, he just got disappointed and Woojin thought that was infinitely worse. 

“We’re sorry.” Daniel spoke up, his voice tiny. Woojin knew that it got even more to Daniel when Jisung was disappointed. 

Instead of any further lectures, Jisung huffed. “Get in the car, it’s getting late.” 

The first few minutes of the car ride were silent and tense, until Jisung huffed again. 

“Listen,” He spoke up again. “I’m not mad at you.” 

They knew that, but neither of them wanted to interrupt him. 

“I get that you’re not kids anymore and that I’m not really entitled to know where you are and what you’re doing any second of the day, but…” He seemed to think for a moment. “I worry, you know?” 

“Yeah,” Daniel muttered while Woojin said: “We know.” At the same time they said: “Sorry.” 

Jisung sighed again. “I know you are.” 

They were silent again after that, but Woojin could tell that there was something else on Jisung’s mind. He just didn’t know whether he should ask, or how. 

Daniel probably didn’t know either, but he asked anyways: “What’s up?” 

“I just…” Jisung cleared his throat. “I’m sorry too.” 

His forehead furrowed in confusion, Woojin forgot his previous caution. “For what?” 

“I know I’m not really doing good on this whole parent shlash legal guardian slash in charge thing,” Jisung started and Woojin’s stomach started coiling up in a peculiar way that he couldn’t really put a name on. If ‘no’ was an emotion it would probably be this. Jisung continued: “And I can’t really offer you-” 

“Stop.” Daniel interrupted him with a vehement shake of his head. Jisung was about to say more and from the look on his face he wasn’t going to stop, so Daniel cut in again. “You’re doing _amazing_ , Jisung. You don’t have anything to blame yourself for.” 

Woojin nodded even though neither of them were looking at him. “You don’t have to be a good parent to us, because you’re not our parent.” He added. “You take care of us. And you’re doing a pretty damn amazing job at that.” 

“Language.” Jisung quietly reminded him. His voice sounded watery. “We’re here.” He announced a second later as he stopped the car and started to get out of it. 

Woojin and Daniel exchanged a quick look before hurrying to get out as well and walk up to Jisung, engulfing the older in a tight hug. 

Jisung laughed, his voice just as watery as it had been in the car. “I love you guys, even if you’re criminals now.” 

“We’re not criminals.” Daniel protested. “That was barely a minor offense--” 

Jisung reached up and ruffled his hair with a smile. “I know.” 

“We love you too.” Woojin spoke up because he felt like it needed to be said. Jisung ruffled his hair as well, squeezed both of them again and then ushered them towards the café’s front door. 

With a smile back on Jisung and Daniel’s faces and the familiar scent of coffee and cream in the air, Woojin immediately felt at ease, felt okay, felt at home. 

He’d been in the foster system for as long as he could remember, and he’d lived in a handful of houses but none of them had ever managed to feel as much like home to him, as this café and this house had when he’d first set foot in it. 

When he’d been 7 he had been sent to a family that already had two foster children. Two boys, he was told beforehand, both of them older than he was. A lovely family, he was told.

It hadn’t taken him long to question that last bit of information. His foster parents were terrible people and had treated him, as well as the two other boys, more like nuisances than kids that had been put in their care. 

Luckily, the two older boys, 12 and 16 years old at the time, had done their best to take care of him and of each other. 

As soon as Jisung turned 18, he left the small suburban house for the city, but he never left Woojin and Daniel. He left with a promise to come and get them. Jisung had always been a man of his word, Daniel assured Woojin back then, when Woojin had tried to force back his tears after they’d seen Jisung off at the train station. “He’s gonna be back for us.” Daniel had smiled and let Woojin climb onto his shoulders and hide his face in his sweater. 

A bit over a year later, Woojin was 10, Jisung had been back. He’d taken Woojin and Daniel out of the house none of them had ever called a home and brought them to the one he’d been able to buy in the city. It was small, Daniel and Woojin had to share a room in the attic, but it was also just as warm and welcoming as Jisung, and they loved it. Jisung had his little café and they all had each other and it was everything they could have ever asked for. 

With a small sigh, Woojin fell into his desk-chair as soon as he and Daniel had made their way up to their room. He touched his computer screen briefly to turn off the stand-by mode and then turned his chair to put the bot back on its small charging station. 

“Wow.” He heard Daniel say suddenly. 

Turning back to him he saw him looking at the computer screen where a sketchy looking website read in huge black and red letters: UNDERGROUND BOT-FIGHTS, DATES AND LOCATIONS. 

Before Woojin could say anything in his defense, Daniel spoke up again with a weird kind of smile. 

“When are you gonna use that big brain of yours for something maybe less illegal, more fulfilling?” 

“Like what?” Woojin asked. “Going to university?” They’d had this conversation before. 

“For example,” Daniel nodded. “Or literally anything else that prodigies who graduated highschool at 14 do, I wouldn’t know.” 

Woojin rolled his eyes. “Why would I sit down in some nerd-school full of nerds just to have certified nerds try and teach me things I already know?” 

“Because you’re also a nerd?” 

“You wound me, Daniel.” 

Daniel sighed, and Woojin hoped that would be the end of it for today, but only a few seconds later, Daniel destroyed that hope. “There’s another one just across town tonight.” He said, pointing at the computer screen. 

“And?” Woojin prodded. 

“Want me to take you?” 

That caught him off-guard. Daniel had repeated how illegal and pointless bot-fighting was just a minute ago. 

“But Jisung…” He started and Daniel shrugged. 

“He went to sleep, he won’t notice. I’ll leave him a note.” 

Woojin was still skeptical about this. Not only about Daniel’s sudden willingness to support this, but also about the prospect of another bot-fight. The last one hadn’t ended all too cheery for him after all. Jisung would hate it, if he ever found out.

“C’mon, it’s been a while since we went on a fun trip on my bike together that wasn’t a chase.” Daniel said again, already on his way towards the stairs. “Race you down!” 

Well, if Daniel was making this a challenge, Woojin didn’t really have any choice but to follow him. 

*** 

“You took about three wrong turns already!” Woojin let Daniel now, roughly two seconds before Daniel took yet another wrong turn. 

“We’re making a little detour!” Daniel called back to him over his shoulder. 

“Where?” 

But Daniel didn’t answer, and only a few seconds later (after the 5th wrong turn), Woojin understood why. “What are we doing at your nerd school?” He whined. 

“Don’t worry we’ll still be on time for the fight, I just have to pick something up.” 

Daniel laughed when Woojin glared at him as they both got off the motorcycle. 

“So you were just offering to take me because you had to go somewhere anyways?” Woojin started his complaints back up again as soon as they began walking towards a side entrance of the huge futuristic building. “Here I was, thinking this was some grand symbolic gesture, supposed to show that you’ll let me make my own independent decisions from now on, and that you’ll let me live my own independent life--” 

“By driving you somewhere because you can’t get there yourself?” Daniel interrupted, but there was no malice behind it. 

It still made Woojin try to glare harder. “See? Now you’re even belittling me! I--” 

“I’m not belittling you, I’m just stating facts.” Daniel laughed. He clearly wasn’t up for picking a fight. But when was he ever? 

Woojin on the other hand, was more than up for it. “Well here’s another fact for you,” He bit out while Daniel pushed him through a big set of swing doors by his shoulders. “I don’t need to depend on you, I could just as well walk out of those fancy doors and take a bus, I don’t need to rely on you for things and you need to stop--” 

He had been so focused on angrily glaring back at Daniel while ranting at him, that he nearly didn’t notice the loud whirring growing louder and louder until a sharp “Out of the way!” called him to attention. 

A quick step to the side barely saved him from being rammed with what looked like some sort of high-tech race bicycle. ‘High-tech’ in the sense that it wouldn’t surprise Woojin if it had a built in TV and AI that told you the exact ground humidity and robotically cheered you on during the ride. 

The boy hopping off the seat didn’t look like he would voluntarily cheer anyone on, robotically or not. He was wearing a helmet, but Woojin could practically feel his eyes burn through the visor. 

“You just nearly died.” He let Woojin know. His voice, muffled by the helmet sounded younger than Woojin had expected. 

“You’re not supposed to do test drives in here anyways, Jinyoung.” Daniel chipped in from a few steps behind Woojin. 

“The test-rink is too far away!” The boy, Jinyoung, lamented. He said more, but Woojin was too caught up in inspecting the bike that had nearly killed him about a minute ago. 

Upon taking a closer look he realized that it was more of a motorcycle than a regular bike, there were no pedals, or a chain. Infact, the wheels weren’t attached to the rest of the vehicle by any visible means, and they weren’t really wheels either, they looked more like very futuristic dinner plates that could potentially be used as weapons. 

A hand on his shoulder pushed Woojin to the side and the wheel he had been looking at was pulled from the rest of the bike with one swift tug.

“Magnetic suspension.” The same young voice, now not muffled anymore, explained, before the wheel landed on a small mountain of similar ones on the ground. 

Not only was his voice young-sounding, the boy was in general really young-looking. Not older than Woojin himself, maybe even younger. 

“What’s up with those?” Woojin asked him, pointing at the wheels on the ground. 

Jinyoung shrugged. “All not fast enough. I’m working on it.” 

That was all the information he seemed to be willing to give him and Woojin just wanted to ask more, like how he was trying to make them faster or how old he was, but he was once again interrupted. 

This time it was not nearly as life-threatening but just as loud. “Jinyoung! I got it!” 

“That’s nice, Daehwi.” Jinyoung replied with a normal, indoor voice. It seemed to Woojin that he was trying to be suave and sarcastic but didn’t quite manage over the actually pretty soft tone of voice he had suddenly taken on. 

Daehwi, the boy quickly making their way towards them, who didn’t seem to know the concept of an indoor voice or sarcasm, only just now seemed to notice that other people were present. 

“Oh, hey Danny! I thought you said you wouldn’t be coming tonight? Did you find your--” His eyes landed on Woojin and he audibly gasped. 

Woojin couldn’t say he normally had that effect on people, so he scrunched up his eyebrows in genuine confusion. “Hi?” 

“It’s you!” The boy all but cheered. He too looked way too young to be in this boring old people university place, and when be turned to Daniel with wide eyes, Woojin wondered if this was just the daycare for the professors’ kids or something. “It’s him, right?” Daehwi inquired. When Daniel nodded, shoulders shaking with silent laughter, the boy let out a high-pitched squeal. 

Without a warning or any chance for Woojin to prepare himself, Daehwi all but jumped forward and wrapped him up in a hug way tighter than Woojin had thought him capable of. “Hi Woojin!” He squeaked into his ear, before releasing him out of his death grip just as quickly. 

“We all heard so much about you! Only good things of course. Well, no, that’s not true, but nothing incriminating!” He started. “Actually, I’ve been telling Daniel forever to bring you here, there’s so many cool things- Oh!” 

As if he’d remembered something, he grabbed Woojin’s hand and pulled him towards another side of the room. A bit helpless, Woojin turned around to Daniel. 

The message he tried to convey with his eyes (“One of your university kindergarteners is kidnapping me, help!”) didn’t seem to get through because Daniel just sent him a smile and a shrug back. 

“You’re going to love this!” Daehwi promised as he dropped Woojin’s hand and turned to a display of different instruments. He briefly considered bolting before he was forced into the third near-death experience of the night, but was quickly distracted from his plan. 

“Do you know what that to your left is?” Daehwi asked while leaning closer to the contraption on the table and pulling out a small bottle of something from his pocket. Possibly it was whatever he had been yelling at Jinyoung about when entering. 

“Big pile of scrap metal.” Woojin deducted with a quick glance to his left. 

“Exactly!” Daehwi chirped as he added the contents of the bottle to a mixture slowly bubbling above a small blue flame. Its colour changed from muddy green to vibrant yellow. “I’ve been wanting to get a middle sized cube of titanium for this, or at least a solid size of any specific metal, but the board isn’t approving any of my requests.” The boy babbled on as he turned some small wheels and added drop after drop of what Woojin guessed were different chemicals to the mixture. 

“At least principal Kwon let me have this little wonder potion!” Daehwi mused, holding up the little bottle again. He didn’t seem like he was expecting any kind of answer from Woojin, so he just resigned to watching the process of whatever it was Daehwi was doing. He was sure there was some kind of point to it. Judging from the reactions the mixture showed, he was mixing several acids together. 

“Alright nearly there, just a bit more- Hah! There we go!” Daehwi pulled the mixture from the flame in a swift motion causing Woojin to flinch violently. If one drop accidentally hit any human body part, it probably wouldn’t end pretty and he still didn’t really believe that Daehwi knew what he was doing. 

“Okay, now watch this!” Daehwi pulled Woojin closer to the pile of metal by his elbow with his free hand, shortly before pouring the entire bubbling mixture over it. Woojin wasn’t that big on physical contact, especially not with strangers, especially not with strangers who were about 12 years old and holding deadly chemicals. 

But the reaction the scrap metal showed immediately upon contact with the mixture, distracted him from his initial plan to run for his life. 

The different pieces of it, no matter how thick or intricately made they were, immediately melted. Within seconds, all that was left was a smooth if kind of dirty silver liquid on the bottom of the box that had been holding them. The box itself, just usual plastic as far as Woojin could tell, did not seem affected at all. 

“Pretty cool, right?” Daehwi’s voice bubbled up with excited laughter. 

Woojin eyed the puddle again and then the various chemicals still gathered on the table next to them in search for an explanation. Daehwi seemed to notice, because he immediately started pointing out and naming several chemicals. “...And with only minimal tweaks to the mixture, I can target specific materials. Or I could do so, in way more detail, if the board would give me some pure metals.” 

The last part was adorned with a childish pout that Woojin couldn’t help but chuckle at. “They have to at some point. This is pretty amazing.” 

The pout fell from Daehwi’s face. “I knew you’d think so!” He mused. Woojin seriously wondered how long Daehwi had waited for him to show up here. It made him feel weird to be welcomed so warmly in this place he had never even thought about visiting before, but in the best way. It made him feel like he fit in. 

“Oh man, there’s so much more interesting stuff we should show you.” Daehwi started rambling again. “Daniel, why didn’t you tell us you two were coming?” He turned an accusing look to the older. 

Daniel in turn, just shrugged. “Kind of a spontaneous decision.” 

“ _Spontaneous decision?_ ” Woojin repeated. “You said you needed to pick something up!” 

“Did I?” Daniel scrunched up his face in exaggerated fake-thought. “My memory is a bit blurry.” 

“It’s because you’re old.” Jinyoung called over from his area of the room. 

Woojin only realized now that the giant room was divided by more or less even lines in neon paint on the ground. The not-square he was standing in right now, Daehwi’s he assumed, was filled with different utensils and chemicals like the ones he had used earlier. Woojin suspected there were much more in all the shelves on the wall. Jinyoung’s area had much less storing space, but a huge outlet full with mechanical tools on one wall. The most space was taken up by a contraption to mount up the bike, Jinyoung’s main focus of work it seemed. 

To Woojin’s left was another one of these areas,but nobody was in it and he couldn’t really tell what the machine in the middle of it was for. While Daniel, Jinyoung and Daehwi behind him were arguing over mental and physical age, Woojin started slowly making his way towards this machine, completely disregarding another line in neon-paint on the ground that clearly advised him to not step over it. 

“Hey, you! Random kid that’s not one of my prodigies! You might wanna not touch that!” A shrill voice came from a good distance away. 

Stopping in his tracks, his hand frozen in mid-air, Woojin turned to see a man approach him with steps as quick as the huge shopping bag in his hands allowed him. 

The guy set down the bag in an armchair behind the next line on the ground and made the last few strides over to Woojin. 

“No need to look like a deer caught in the headlights, buddy.” He grinned. “I don’t know if this is actually dangerous, I just assume Sungwoon drew that ‘Do Not Trespass’ line on the ground there for a reason. You can never be sure though. Maybe he just wants to be left alone.” 

“What is it?” Woojin asked him, ignoring the rest of what the guy said. 

“I just told you I can’t say if it’s dangerous and you expect me to know what it is? It has something to so with plasma, that’s all I gathered. Won’t fry my food, apparently.” 

“It literally won’t, Jaehwan, stop suggesting it.” Another new voice cut in. 

“I’m not suggesting, I’m complaining.” Jaehwan huffed. “When will one of you finally make something that can give me food so I don’t have to go on grocery runs in the middle of the night?” That seemed to remind him of something. “Oh yeah. I brought food!” He called to the other three still gathered by Jinyoung’s bike. 

The owner of the last voice, at least Woojin assumed him to be, the lab was getting kind of crowded, emerged from behind a shelf a bit to the side. He had his mouth open, probably to retort something to Jaehwan, but stopped when his eyes landed on Woojin. 

“Who’s this?” He asked no one in particular. It was lacking any enthusiasm that Daehwi had or the likable sarcasm in Jaehwan’s voice. In fact, Woojin thought it was exactly the kind of attitude someone should have when an unknown teenager was standing behind one’s bright orange ‘Do Not Tresspass’ line. 

The guy’s brazen tone of voice maybe would have intimidated him, if it wasn’t for the fact that everything else about this situation was nearly comically unintimidating. Despite his big bad mood the guy was absolutely unthreatening, he was not on the tall side and the giant baby blue hoodie he was wearing wasn’t helping. Neither were the glasses sitting crookedly on his nose. Daehwi was skipping -literally skipping- over to where Jaehwan was sorting out the groceries, and Daniel still had the same easy smile on his face that he always had when he was comfortable, when he joined them. 

“This is Woojin.” He introduced, resting a hand on Woojin’s shoulder. “Jin, this is Sungwoon, and this is everyone else. Daehwi and Jinyoung have been here for about a year, Sungwoon for as long as me and Jaehwan… I think Jaehwan was just always here, he came with the room.” 

“We suspect he’s a ghost, cursed to haunt this building after he died in a horrible experimental accident.” Jinyoung chipped in, his voice slightly muffled by the hand full of chips he had stuffed into his mouth. 

“How many times do I have to tell you people that I’m not dead?!” Jaehwan exclaimed. “Toffee?” He immediately went back to a normal conversational tone when offering the bag to Woojin. 

“So, what do you do?” Woojin asked him while munching on a way too sweet chocolate toffee. 

“Nothing. I just provide people with toffees.” Jaehwan shrugged. “I don’t do science that’s really not my forte.” 

“Then why are you here?” 

“We’ve been asking us the same thing forever.” Sungwoon threw in. 

“I don’t understand what they do” Jaehwan pointed the bag of toffees at Woojin, ignoring Sungwoon. “But it’s really cool and they’re really good at it.” 

“Also he wants us to build him a freeze ray.” Daehwi added. 

“Or a flame suit.” Sungwoon nodded. 

“Once he asked me for an invisibility cloak.” Jinyoung recalled. 

“And did I get any of those things? No! Because ‘that’s not what we’re here for, Jaehwan, we’re here for _actual_ science!’” 

As the four of them fell into a discussion about what qualified as “actual science”, Daniel tapped Woojin’s shoulder and motioned for him to follow. 

“I wanna show you something.” He let him know quietly. 

They went through a metal door behind some shelves by Daehwi’s area and found themselves in what had probably once been a regular office. 

“Welcome to my humble abode.” Daniel motioned around the room awkwardly and chuckled at the raised eyebrow Woojin gave him. 

“Why do you get your own room?” 

“Because I’m the coolest person here.” Daniel said matter-of-factly. 

Woojin laughed. “I’ve known these people for about 10 minutes, but--” 

“I didn’t bring you here for you to bully me.” Daniel interrupted him. He stepped closer and held out a hand. “I need your arm.” 

“Why? You have two of your own.” Woojin narrowed his eyes at him. 

Daniel didn’t reply, just grabbed his arm and pinched it, entirely without warning. 

“Ow! What was that for? You know I wasn’t serious about--” 

He was cut off by sudden movement from behind him and a mechanical beep. 

Turning towards it, he nearly yelped again, in surprise this time instead of pain. When they had come in, there had only been the two of them, no other living beings there. Taking a closer look now, he realized that that was still the case, technically. 

“Hello” A mechanically echoing voice sounded through the room. “My name is Minhyun. I am your personal healthcare companion.” 

Woojin was faced with a robot waving at him. He -its humanoid exterior and the name the robot had introduced himself with made Woojin assume it was meant to be male- looked roughly in his mid-twenties, judging from the smooth features of his face. 

Woojin was reminded of something he had read about back in school. A few decades back, robots had been a far cry from what they were now, both software and hardware wise. Even the ones meant to look like humans could very easily be distinguished from the actual living thing, so much it had made them strange and in some cases downright scary to look at. Now, with advanced micro-technology available for facial features and a wide variety of materials being accessible for robotics, creations like ‘Minhyun’ were possible, but Woojin hadn’t seen many around. 

“I was notified about the presence of a hurt patient, when you said: _Ow._.” Minhyun let him know. “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your pain?” 

“Is this the reason why Daehwi isn’t getting his metals?” Woojin completely ignored the robot’s question. “Because they let you build a robotic nurse and now all their funds are drained?” 

He didn’t quite know the numbers but he figured that getting a robot to look as live-like as this couldn’t be cheap. 

“I wanted to make him unthreatening.” Daniel answered, probably able to tell what Woojin was thinking about. “Just like an everyday nurse, you know? But more efficient.” 

“How is he more efficient?” Woojin inquired. “No offense.” He added in the robot’s direction. 

“I can not be offended.” The robot gave back. Huh. Woojin supposed he was right. He didn’t know whether to count this as a downside of the unthreatening exterior Daniel had been going for. 

“Tell him to scan you.” Was Daniel’s answer to Woojin’s initial question. There was an excited gleam in his eyes that reminded Woojin a bit of when Jisung had brought home that little stray kitten two years back. 

Still kind of skeptical, Woojin pointed a single useless finger-gun at Minhyun (he didn’t think robots could understand finger-guns) and repeated: “Scan me.” He paused for a second. “Please.” 

“Of course.” Minhyun replied and Woojin wondered if the robot appreciated the formality. Had he been confronted with a lot of patients yet? Did he even know what manners were? 

“Scan complete.” Minhyun notified him. “There is a minor skin-aggravation on your arm. It should be better in a short while. Do you still want treatment?” 

“Uh… sure, why not?” 

“I can treat the area with a soothing gel. Its main active substance is dexpanthenol. Do you want to proceed?” 

“Bummer, I’m allergic to that.” Woojin grinned knowingly in Daniel’s direction, but he in turn just pointed his attention back to Minhyun. 

“That is not correct.” The robot said. 

“Huh?” 

“You are not allergic to dexpanthenol.” If Woojin didn’t know better he would have said Minhyun sounded exasperated. 

“Did he get that from scanning me?” Woojin asked Daniel, who just grinned. 

“My operating system lets me scan a patient’s vital signs.” Minhyun spoke up. “For their treatment, I need to be aware of any allergies or other restrictions.” 

“That’s true, I guess. And you’re right, I’m not allergic to… whatever you said.” 

“Dexpanthenol.” Minhyun repeated, then added: “I know.” 

The bluntness of it made Woojin laugh. While holding his arm out to the robot, he turned to Daniel. 

“How long did you spend on coding for this?” 

“Eons.” Daniel huffed, but it didn’t seem as exhausted as Woojin thought was warranted. Instead Daniel looked accomplished, proud, excited even. 

He stepped closer to Woojin and Minhyun and reached out a hand to what Woojin had thought to be a decorative pin on the shirt Minhyun was wearing. The fact that the robot was wearing human clothes was funny enough as it was, even though, given the overall very human looks of him, it probably would have been weirder if Minhyun hadn’t been wearing clothes. 

The pin, it turned out, was not actually a pin, but a hatch for flash drives. It opened when Daniel touched it and out came a single pink plastic chip. _Daniel K_ it read, and beneath it a ridiculous smiley face.

“This thing holds my last two years of work.” Daniel explained. “It’s what makes him Minhyun.” 

“That sounds pretty epic.” 

“I’d hope so, I nearly died working on this.” Daniel sent a small smile the robot’s way. “He’s gonna help a lot of people.” 

It was so much something that Daniel would say that Woojin couldn’t even bring himself to call him dramatic. Instead, he stayed quiet, a small smile on his lips.

Minhyun let go of Woojin’s arm after applying the gel. “I am done with your treatment. I can deactivate when you say: ‘I am satisfied with my care.’” 

With a grin, Woojin said: “The care you gave me was satisfactory.” 

“I cannot deactivate until you say: ‘I am satisfied with my care.’” Minhyun repeated. 

“There was satisfaction felt because of-” 

“Please stop bullying the robot.” Daniel whined. 

“Fine. I’m satisfied with my care.” Woojin laughed. 

Minhyun did not seem to be all that bothered by the little detour it took to get here. Of course not. He was a robot. 

“I am glad to hear that.” He said, then took a few steps back to the corner of the room where a small piece of metal was resting on the floor. Minhyun placed his foot on it, closed his eyes and stilled entirely. 

“That’s his charging station.” Daniel explained before Woojin could ask. “It was originally bigger because I didn’t have time to spend on it but our professor helped me with it.” 

“And I’m glad it’s working so well.” A voice from the door cut in. 

A middle-aged woman stepped in, one of Jaehwan’s toffees in her hand. “Mr. Kang, I’m glad you could come by tonight after all. Mr. Ha told me you had family-issues to attend to?” 

Daniel pointed a finger at Woojin. “That’s the family-issue.” 

The woman laughed and held out a hand to Woojin. “Park Jiyoung” She introduced herself. The name seemed familiar to Woojin, but he couldn’t place where he would have heard of her before. Daniel had probably mentioned her over dinner once. 

“Woojin.” He gave back. 

“Sungwoon mentioned something about bot-fighting when talking about Daniel’s absence.” She went on, before her eyes landed on the bag of Woojin’s hoodie, or more, the bot sticking out from there. “May I take a look? My son used to be very into these a few months back.” 

Woojin hurried up to nod and held the bot out to her. She eyed it with undisguised interest, turning it this way and that, chuckling slightly at the face Woojin had hastily drawn on it with a sharpie - it had looked excruciatingly boring without one. 

He had to admit, it still looked pretty boring, even with the addition of a rudimentary face. The power of it was in its simplicity. Woojin’s bot was made up of several smaller pieces that could detach from another upon electrical signals. The pieces were fairly small, equipped with a micro-technology that had been released about five years ago by a scientist from this very city. It was fairly useful to incorporate in everyday operating systems, and a lot of fighting-bots had it, but all to a bigger scale than Woojin’s still. The little parts of the robot were basically small robots themselves. Woojin had gotten used to call them microbots. 

“Interesting concept, you chose there.” Mrs. Park spoke up. 

Woojin nodded, not able to fight the proud smile making its way to his face. “It operates with MicroWare.” He told her. “Which means each of these--” 

Daniel cut him off. “You don’t need to explain that to her.” He let Woojin know. “She invented it.” 

_Park Jiyoung_. “Oh!” Woojin exclaimed. “You’re--” 

“Kahi.” The woman nodded. “I left that nickname behind when I went into teaching though.” 

“She didn’t.” Daniel chuckled. “Everyone still calls you that, Miss.” 

Kahi smiled wistfully, but somehow Woojin didn’t think she was really bothered by it. “Very true, Daniel. Very true.” 

She held the bot out to Woojin again. “This is some excellent work. Did you make it yourself?” When he nodded, she continued: “Have you ever considered applying here? Your age wouldn’t be a problem, you’ve met Daehwi and Jinyoung, I suppose.” 

“I have.” Woojin nodded. “Met Daehwi and Jinyoung, that is.” He didn’t mention his more than negative attitude to university. Partially because he felt like this university teacher wouldn't appreciate it, partially because now that Daniel had dragged him here it somehow didn’t seem as demonic anymore. There was toffees. 

“Maybe you should take our institution into consideration.” Kahi smiled. “Daniel, please make sure the rest of your team don’t stay a lot longer. Especially the kids, they tend to overestimate themselves on week-nights.” 

“I know, Miss. I’ll try.” 

Kahi sent them both another smile before leaving the room. It was quiet for a few moments. 

“Daniel.” Woojin spoke up. 

“Hm?” In any other circumstances Woojin would have called Daniel out for the amused smile on his face. He was definitely laughing at him, but Woojin had more important things to care about. 

“How do I get into this school?” 

*** 

Woojin hadn’t expected it would be so much work to get into a place as boring as university. But apparently, when you were a 16 year-old who had graduated highschool two years prior and regular applications were officially closed for the semester, your best shot was the invention showcase the school held. And apparently, your best shot at the showcase was something that had never been there before. 

“A lot of things have been invented already, how am I supposed to invent something groundbreakingly new?!” Woojin exclaimed, then let his head drop onto his desk. 

“Maybe you burned yourself out in high school.” Guanlin helpfully chipped in from his position on Woojin’s bed. “Maybe your brain is just as empty as mine now.” 

“Your brain isn’t empty.” Woojin gave back, his voice muffled by the wood of his desk. “Both, scientifically and figuratively.” 

“Well, the facts are that I’m still in high school, like a normal person, and I’m spending my Saturday helping my best friend, who should also be in high school but was too smart and left me behind, to get into college. Do with that what you want.” 

“That has absolutely nothing to do with the void that your brain isn’t.” Woojin noted. 

“Maybe so, but this conversation is also not helping you get into college.” The cat jumped up onto the bed then, with a loud meow. “See? Milktea agrees.”

Instead of an answer, Woojin released a high-pitched whine. 

“Ah, yes.” Daniel’s voice suddenly cut in. “The sweet sounds of higher education.” 

“Not helping.” Woojin bit out between his teeth. 

“Yeah, Daniel.” Guanlin backed him up. “Use your smart old person mouth to help or leave, we’re in a crisis situation here.” 

“I’m here to help!” Daniel lifted up his hands in defense. “Stop attacking me!” 

“Oh, nice!” Guanlin immediately smiled and patted the bed beside him for Daniel to sit down. 

“So, buddy, what do we got?” Daniel asked as soon as he was settled, Milktea curled up in his lap and purring. 

“Nothing.” Woojin’s cheek was still resting against the cool wood. “My brain is empty.” 

Guanlin spoke up: “You just told me that in a scientific and figurative way--” 

“I know what I said, Guanlin.” Woojin cut him off. “It’s a figure of speech.” 

“Oh, but it isn’t when I say it?” Guanlin started to challenge him, but added, before Woojin could reply: “Nevermind! This is not getting you into university.” 

Daniel didn’t seem like he had listened to their mini-detour in conversation. “You know,” He said, as if in thought, scratching the cat behind her ears. “I don’t know why you’re even thinking so much about something new.” 

Much to Milktea’s displeasure he set her down on the mattress and walked over to Woojin’s bedside table slowly, picking up something there. 

“That’s the point of the showcase, Dan.” Woojin sat up straight to look at him. “You were the one who told me this. I need to invent something completely knew and--” 

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen anything like this before you nearly let it drop into my breakfast cereal the other week.” Daniel was holding up Woojin’s fighting bot. 

“Yeah, I still don’t understand how that thing works.” Guanlin chipped in. “But I like its little face.” 

“Neural transmitters, magnetic waves.” Woojin uttered. “It does what you want it to do.” 

“Which, correct me if I’m wrong, would abolish the use of any kind of remote and would make it that much easier and faster to use.” Daniel provided. 

Realization dawned on Woojin’s face. “A lot of microbots…” He started. 

“Could do a lot more things easier and faster.” Daniel went on. 

“You could, like, build houses with only your mind!” Guanlin exclaimed. 

He clearly meant it as some sort of excited exaggeration, but Woojin blinked at him twice, and concluded: “You actually could, if you had enough of them.” 

“Wait, for real?” Guanlin asked, but Woojin had already whirled around and was scribbling on his notepad as fast as he could. 

Things were finally happening, and they were already behind schedule. 

*** 

“So on a scale of one to ten, how nervous would you say you are?” Daniel asked, as Woojin fiddled with the strings of his hoodie next to him. 

“Minus twelve.” Woojin bit out between his teeth. 

They were sat near the entrance of the campus’ main hall, _‘The place where the magic happens’_ Jaehwan had called it when they’d agreed on a meeting point earlier. Right now, it was only Woojin and Daniel, waiting for Jisung and the rest of their friends to arrive. 

In the past few weeks, Woojin had learned that while being wonderful people, Daniel’s group of friends were not particularly gifted with things like order or punctuality, but he still sincerely hoped that they wouldn’t be way too late for this- The majority of the microbots they all had helped to build under Woojin’s guidance was in Sungwoon’s van. 

Daniel sighed and put an arm around Woojin’s shoulders. 

“You’re gonna do great, there’s nothing to worry about. You’re probably smarter than everyone in the audience, anyways.” 

“You don’t have to be smart to be judgmental.” Woojin muttered. 

“True, sadly. But if it means anything, we all know how much work you put into this and we’re really proud of you. _I’m_ really proud of you.” 

A tiny smile managed to break through the tension on Woojin’s face. “Thanks.” He whispered. 

He could still feel the anxiety boiling beneath his skin, but Daniel’s presence had always managed to calm him down. It felt familiar, safe. 

No matter if he succeeded or failed tonight, Daniel would be there for him. 

“There they are! Woojin!” 

Before he knew it, Guanlin was squeezing him from his other side with a wide grin. “We met your science friends in the parking lot!” 

“Yeah, and they refused to help your science friends with the tons of bots they had to push all the way here.” Jaehwan added as he settled the container down. 

“This is literally your one job here.” Sungwoon reminded him. 

“Only because you didn’t allow me to actually build these things.” 

“Because you know nothing about building things, Jaehwan.” 

“Maybe so,” Jaehwan allowed. “Maybe so.” 

“Jaehwan isn’t actually a science friend.” Jinyoung said to Guanlin then. “He’s more like a science hogger. A science menace.” 

“And we all love him!” Daehwi added. 

“I’m feeling the love.” Jaehwan pouted. 

Jisung joined the little group then with a small take-away bag from the café in hand. “Not the time to be gloomy.” He commented on Jaehwan’s pout, before holding the bag out to Woojin. 

“What do I do with this?” Woojin asked. 

“Eat it.” 

“I’m not--” 

“Woojin, you skipped dinner. Eat it.” 

Woojin sighed. He felt like if he ate anything right now it would send his body into full breakdown, dealing with digestion and extreme stress at the same time. “I really don’t feel like it.” He tried weakly. 

Jisung’s eyes grew softer as he nudged the bag into Woojin’s direction again. “Take it at least, so you have it when you feel like it.” 

“Thank you.” Woojin muttered stuffing the colourful paper bag into his backpack. 

Jisung smiled at him, then looked around the group. “It’s about time we get this show on the road, isn’t it?” He asked. 

“Yeah, you’re up in 15 minutes.” Daniel agreed while giving Woojin’s shoulder a last squeeze and then pulling him up from where they were sitting. “You ready?” 

“No.” Woojin immediately said. 

“Well the clock says you gotta be.” Sungwoon reminded him. 

“Yeah.” Woojin sighed and looked around once. “Let’s go.” 

Daehwi’s and Jaehwan’s enthusiastic cheers and Jisung’s and Daniel’s wide smiles made him feel like he was maybe a little bit ready. 

The huge hall was filled with all kinds of machines and screens and people using them and displaying them and marvelling at them. The buzz of the crowd immediately mixed with that of Woojin’s nerves and he couldn’t quite tell if that was a good or a bad thing. 

He also couldn’t quite tell whether he was taking left or right turns as Daniel was pushing him through to the presentation stage further at the back of the hall. He couldn’t tell the moment their friends left them to position the microbots at their respective spots for the presentation. He couldn’t tell if he’d imagined the quick hugs Daniel and Jisung squeezed in before he was ushered onto stage by a tired looking school secretary and there was a mic pushed into his hands. 

The first thing he realized again was the reverb of the microphone as he stepped too close to the speakers in the front. The sharp note pulled him out of his reveries and into a reality where a small group people in front of the stage was waiting for him to say something. 

“Uhm. Hi. I’m Park Woojin.” 

Most of the showcase’s visitors were busy in the actual exhibition, he knew. Only a handful of potential future students, scientists, perhaps one or two professors, were standing in front of him right now, next to his overenthusiastic loved ones. He could do this. 

“I brought something today that I’ve been working on for quite some while now.” He continued, his voice more sure. He heard Jaehwan whoop quietly. He could do this. 

And he did. He breezed through the presentation and said everything he had practiced saying on Guanlin for hours, and he ended with a wide smile on his face and with the applause of strangers and the cheers of his friends. 

It all hadn’t quite clicked yet, even when he stepped off stage after sending the microbots back to their respective containers, even when his friends crowded around him, all talking at once. 

“See?” Daniel smiled, ruffling his hair. “I told you you’d do great.” 

“You blew them away!” Daehwi yelled, mimicking an explosion with his hands. 

“I nearly started crying.” Jinyoung added, sounding absolutely deadpan, but Woojin could feel the sincerity in his words in the way the younger boy squeezed his shoulder shortly. 

Guanlin was buzzing in front of Woojin with a wide smile on his face. “That was so cool! I knew it would be cool, but I never saw this in action and honestly, what even was that?! You deserve an award for that, this has to be some kind of once in a millenium breakthrough!” 

He looked like he was willing and prepared to go on with his excited praises, but he was interrupted. 

“Your friend isn’t entirely wrong, Mr. Park.” 

A woman was approaching them with purposeful steps. Everything about her, from her perfectly styled hair over the professional distance in her smile to the tablet PC in her hands said money and business and all of it intimidated Woojin nearly as much as the knowledge about her identity. 

Somewhere behind him, he heard Jaehwan whisper-yell: “That’s Shin Yumi. Sungwoon that's--” 

Sungwoon shushed him. “We know!” 

Shin stopped a few steps away from the small group and turned her full attention on Woojin. It frankly made him want to bolt out of the hall as quickly as possible. 

“The presentation you just gave was more than fascinating. Can I take a look?” She pointed a hand to the small plastic box in Woojin’s hand with the one microbot Woojin had started his presentation with. 

He hurried to nod and hand it to her. It was completely quiet as she eyed the bot from this way and that, safe for his own heartbeat Woojin could hear. 

“This is some excellent work, Mr. Park.” Shin said. “With a bit of guidance and the right funds, who knows, maybe your friend wasn’t so off about his ‘once in a millenium breakthrough’.” She sent another short, icy smile vaguely in Woojin’s direction, before continuing with her attention back on the bot. 

“Now, I’m not sure how much you understand about business, but I’m assuming you understand how valuable this can be, for the both of us.” 

She lowered the hand holding the bot and reached into the inside of her jacket, pulling out a sleek silver card minimalistically adorned with her name and information to contact her. 

“I’d be pleased to talk to you about the prospects of selling your idea to Shin Enterprises.” 

It took a few seconds of staring at the small card held out in front of him for Woojin to remember how to speak, if barely. “S-selling?” He repeated. 

“Oh, but of course.” Shin nodded. “Your invention could help my business that much more, and I’m sure a smart young man such as yourself would know not to turn down such a generous offer--” 

“Woojin, there you are.” 

Kahi was approaching them, but her face was steely as she seemed to realize who they were with, nothing like the warm and welcoming way she had talked to Woojin the first time he saw her. 

“Yumi.” She addressed Shin. “I didn’t know you would be here tonight.” 

“I always am, Kahi. You know I’m an avid supporter of everything to do with our future. And the young intellectuals who will form it.” Her smile reminded Woojin of a panther out for prey. 

“To exploit them with no regards for the risks and collateral damage.” Kahi shot back. For a second, Shin’s face fell, a crack in her practiced demeanor. But before she could reply anything, Kahi had turned to Woojin. 

“Shin Yumi is the most egocentric person I am disappointed to call a part of the scientific community of this city. She values money over education, over _anything_.” 

“Now, Kahi, that’s--” Shin started, but it was Woojin this time who held up a hand. 

“Miss Shin, I’m flattered by your consideration.” He started carefully. “But my microbots are not for sale.” 

Something about the fact that he knew her to be a person of trust and authority in Daniel’s life, told him that there was more truth to Kahi’s words than only the bite of them let on. 

“Well,” Shin took a second to gather herself, before holding her silver card back out to him. “Should you ever change your mind--” 

“I don’t think that will be necessary. Thank you.” Woojin interrupted her again. In the back of his mind he realized he had just rudely cut off one of the city’s most influential women twice in the same conversation, but there was a time to dwell on that other than now. 

Shin nodded curtly before putting the card away again and turning on her heel, leaving them without a further word. 

“You made the right decision, Woojin.” Kahi assured him. “And I’m sure I made the right one too.” 

With a smile, she handed him an envelope made from thick cream white paper, the school’s logo printed on the front. “I look forward to teaching you.” 

*** 

Since Woojin graduated high school, Daniel had oftentimes tried to convince him to start university. He had tried when he himself was still a senior in highschool, had tried when he graduated and wanted Woojin to start uni with him. (“How awesome would that be? _Hi I’m Daniel, this is my creepy little genius brother best friend, we’re both freshmen but he’s smarter than all of you idiots combined!_ ”) 

Given these circumstances, Woojin had expected to hear the words “I told you so” way more than he actually had since he’d decided to get into this school. But Daniel hadn’t belittled him for his, he admitted it himself, late decision, he had been downright excited and supportive to the point one could have believed it to be his own college admission on the line. 

In fact, the only time Woojin did hear the words he had expected to hear more often, was right after Daniel had pulled him away from the crowd of their friends. They had left the school’s main hall all together after Kahi had given Woojin his acceptance letter, whooping and cheering, and had only let him go after Jisung had promised everyone celebratory donuts at the café and they had agreed to meet up back there. 

“I told you you’d do amazing.” Daniel said, as they were slowly walking towards the spot where his motorcycle was parked. “I mean, you did trip on your way up the stage but that was bound to happen with those two left feet of yours…” 

Woojin laughed and playfully bumped their shoulders together. “Careful, I’m about to break all your academic records.” 

“Let’s not pretend like you haven’t already done that, you creepy little genius.” Daniel reached out a hand to ruffle his hair. 

They stopped by a little pond, far enough from the hall that the noise couldn’t be heard but close enough still that you could see its lights faintly. 

“I’m glad you took me here, even if it was an evil scheme of yours to make me a nerd.” Woojin quietly admitted. 

“You were already a nerd. I just gave you an opportunity to bloom in your nerdiness.” 

“Please stop trying to make nerd-culture sound poetic, it really, really isn’t.” 

Daniel laughed softly and they fell into silence after that. 

Woojin looked around and couldn’t quite believe how he got here. Back when he was small, his social workers and foster parents had dismissed him as a know-it-all who didn’t know how to shut up. He had never thought that could be a good thing until he met Daniel and Jisung. He hadn’t known a lot of good things before he met Daniel and Jisung. 

And now he was here and he had his family and a place in a top-notch university and a bunch of pretty weird but pretty awesome friends and he couldn’t quite believe it, but it was all here. 

The thought made his chest swell with something warm, made his eyes sting slightly and made the corners of his lips move up. 

“What are you thinking about?” Daniel asked. 

“When do you think Jisung will start crying?” Woojin gave back, because trying to explain his thoughts would definitely not help hold back the stinging in his eyes. He suspected Daniel knew, anyways. He always did. 

“My bet is he’s crying right now in the car and bribing Guanlin to keep it a secret with extra muffins.” Daniel grinned. 

Woojin nodded. “Good guess. But he’ll also probably try to make some kind of speech later and get all choked u-- What’s that noise?” 

A distant high pitched note, somewhat like a whine, had suddenly filled the air. It was the sort of noise both close enough to a natural sound of distress to put your nerves on edge and close enough to something mechanical going horribly wrong to do the same. 

“Sounds like it’s coming from the hall. Should we check?” 

Daniel was already walking back the way they came from while he said it. 

It didn’t take long for the main hall to come back into their line of vision. They had seen the flicker that unnatural light couldn’t imitate quite like that even before that. As they got closer they heard not only the mechanical siren but also countless cries of actual people, some crowding a safe distance away from the burning building, some hurrying along the ways leading away from it. 

There were no firefighters in sight yet, as far as Woojin could see. 

They were already pretty close to the burning building, everyone around them was hurrying in the opposite direction, but Daniel in front of him kept walking, right up until a girl ran straight into him. 

“Are you okay?” He asked her, as Woojin picked up her bag from the ground and handed it back to her. 

She nodded, seemingly still a bit out of it. 

“Did everyone get out okay?” Daniel asked again. 

“I’m not sure.” She replied. “Kahi… I don’t know where she went before the fire started.” She looked shocked at her own words. “Oh god, she’s probably still in there.” 

Daniel nodded and ushered her to continue into the opposite direction, away from fire. 

“Daniel--” Woojin started, even though he didn’t think that he was listening. Daniel’s eyes were set on the burning building. 

“The firefighters won’t be quick enough.” He said, to no one in particular.

“Dan, you can’t--” Woojin tried again, and this time, Daniel turned to look at him. 

“She might still be alive in there. Maybe she’s not the only one. If I can help, I have to.” 

There was a fierce determination in his eyes Woojin had never seen there before. 

“That’s insane!” He yelled. “You can’t just--” 

But Daniel was already turning back to the building. 

“Stay put, I’ll be back in no time.” He said, not listening to what Woojin was telling him he could or couldn’t do. 

A sick sort of tension settled in Woojin’s stomach, the reverb of it nearly drowning out the sirens in his ears, as he watched Daniel take off into a sprint towards the front entrance of the building. 

“Daniel!” He tried, but over the sirens and the yelling and his own determination, Daniel didn’t react. He disappeared over the threshold. 

Woojin debated with himself for the fragment of a second. Daniel had told him to stay put, but what was he supposed to do here, when Daniel was in there now and needed help getting people out? He wan’t a child anymore, he could help just as much as Daniel. It would be quicker, too, they’d be back out way faster, the firefighters would be here very soon, he could help Daniel before the building--

Before Woojin could take more than one step towards the entrance, there was a reverberating sound louder than any siren. It was as if the tension in his stomach grew, became too big for his body and threw it backwards to the ground. He couldn’t see anything but white, he couldn’t feel anything but a dull ache in the back of his head and he couldn’t hear anything but his own voice. 

_“Daniel!”_

 

 **{ the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass }**

In big cities, there were a lot of small things, things that could be overlooked in the bright busy chaos of it all. Things that could be lost and would probably never be found again because they were simply drowned out with the significance of bigger things. 

What Woojin had lost was not small, was far from insignificant, but the city and its bustling colours and busy noise didn’t care and he felt infinitely small. He felt small when Jisung drove him to the police station, houses and streets and places he knew passing by outside of the window, things he was familiar with but that seemed unfamiliar and alien now. 

He felt small when the house was crowded with people dressed in black on the weekend, when he locked himself in his, _their_ room and drowned out Jisung’s and Guanlin’s knocks on the door. 

He felt small every day after that, when he stopped ignoring them and unlocked the door, but everything kept feeling unfamiliar and alien and on hold like it would only resume to be truly his life when he found the missing piece. But he couldn’t. 

Jisung said he’d need time, that it wasn’t a matter of days to feel whole again, or even weeks, but he would. It sounded more like a promise than consolation, and Woojin wanted to believe it, especially when he sometimes heard Jisung’s muffled crying through the house. 

He wanted to be whole again, but he got up every day finding himself waiting for a voice, a presence, a smile that wasn’t there anymore and he felt like he wouldn’t be whole. 

“Woojin.” Jisung called softly before opening the door. “Guanlin called, he asked if you wanted to meet him Jinyoung and Daehwi in that new retro arcade that opened downtown.” 

While talking, Jisung walked around the room and did his usual round, picking up a barely touched plate of food, opening the blinds that much more, rearranging the university textbooks like Woojin had done anything to get them out of the order Jisung had put them in last. 

“And I got another letter from school, telling me to remind you that classes started but it’s not too late to register just yet.” He put down an envelope on a small stack of ones just like it. The one at the very bottom was the only one Woojin had ever opened, a generic and cold paragraph filled with all their condolences about Daniel’s untimely death, another five informing him about upcoming classes and appointments within the school facility. As if Woojin would ever be able to set a foot on campus again. 

Kahi’s classes had been put under the supervision of another professor, Kim Eunyoung, the letter had informed him. It didn’t say why. The part of the letter not meant only for him, the one meant for the general student public who shouldn’t be burdened with things like loss and death, gave no information about the fire, about the two lives it took. It was just as much part of the big bustling city as everything else was, drowning out missing things as insignificant. 

After Jisung had left, with the usual look back over his shoulder, the usual hope that Woojin would ask him to stay, to talk about things they probably should talk about, the room fell into silence again. Woojin got up from where he had been sitting on his bed, started pacing from this corner of his room to that, restless and unable to decide on a task he knew he didn’t really have the energy to do. 

He should text Guanlin, tell him some generic excuse why he wouldn’t come to the arcade. Guanlin wouldn’t believe it but he wouldn’t confront him about it. He should go downstairs and help Jisung with the chores, give him a hug. Jisung would be overjoyed probably, would maybe coax him into an emotional talk. He should write an E-mail to school administration that they should stop sending him letters, he wasn’t going to attend class. 

In the midst of the way from his desk to his wardrobe and back, he tripped over a hoodie he had left on the floor. He caught the fall with his hands, but his knee still bumped painfully against the edge of his bed, causing him to release a short yelp of pain. 

The noise cut through the silence of the room like something sharp, foreign, and somehow still there just as stark as it came even as the pain in Woojin’s knee already started to become dull. It took him a few seconds to realize that what was different from before was not the lingering of his yelp, but the fact that it hadn’t turned back to silence afterwards. There was a steady mechanic beep from somewhere, along with soft scraping against the floor. 

Slowly, Woojin turned to the thin room divider that Jisung had wordlessly put up about a week after the fire. “You’ll get miserable if you keep having to- to see his stuff.” He had quietly explained later that day. Woojin had refrained from correcting him, from telling Jisung he already was miserable. He suspected Jisung knew. 

Behind that wall-divider, there had only been silence, for weeks now. Silence, looming and heavy and empty and reminding Woojin more of the void behind it than actually seeing it ever could have, but somehow he didn’t have the heart or motivation to put the divider away. Right now, there was something else behind there, a noise, a presence, Woojin thought as the scraping against the floor continued, even though he knew that was ridiculous. 

“Hello?” He dared. His voice sounded foreign and he immediately felt ridiculous with the unfamiliarity of it in the nearly quiet room. There couldn’t be anybody there, but here he was, talking anyways, as if he was gonna get a reply. As if there was ever gonna be another reply from Daniel’s part of the room again. 

When he did get a reply, it took his all to not let out a loud cry of surprise. “One moment, please.” 

“W-Who’s there?” Woojin asked, taking a tentative step towards the divider. Behind the thin material he could now see a figure very clearly. 

“One moment, please.” The figure repeated. It sounded exactly the same as the first time they had said it, like a record was being repeated. There was more scraping on the ground, then: “This room is not made to get through quickly. My apologies.” 

“It’s alright.” Woojin gave back, his voice strained with the adrenaline running through his body. Did he just say ‘it’s alright’ to a random man that was approaching him, after probably having broken into his home? 

He could see the man reach out for the divider now, and his thought went into a flurry as it was pushed aside. Should he call for Jisung? Should he call the police? How did this guy break into a 4th floor window? Why did he break in at all,when there was barely anything here to steal? Who--

“Hello.” Woojin’s jaw fell slack. “My name is Minhyun. I’m your personal healthcare companion.” 

There, standing on the thin non-existent line between his and Daniel’s space, stood Daniel’s robot, blinking at Woojin as Woojin was blinking back in stunned silence. 

Minhyun must have interpreted Woojin’s gaping the wrong way, because he continued: “You do not need to be scared, I am here to help. I was notified of a hurt patient by a noise of distress. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain?” 

“I-...” Woojin started, but his voice gave out. There was a weird kind of lump in his chest. 

“Can you speak?” Minhyun asked after another few seconds of silence. Woojin nodded, even though he wasn’t sure he could trust himself to talk. The lump in his chest grew the longer he looked at the robot.

“To proceed with your treatment, I need some information.” Minhyun informed him. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain?” 

“I’m not-” Woojin tried again, and again his voice gave out. He cleared his throat and continued, quieter than before: “I didn’t know you were still active.” 

“I was charging.” Minhyun said, matter-of-factly. “To proceed with your treatment, I need some inform--” 

“Zero.” Woojin hurried to say, now that he found his voice. “I’m fine, I’m not injured,really. You can scan me if you don’t believe me.” He added after a second. He didn’t know if Minhyun was capable of doubt but he’d thought he’d seen traces of it on the robot’s face. 

“Of course.” Minhyun nodded, and another small beep sounded through the small room. “Scan complete.” 

“So you can see that I’m fine and--” 

“You do not have any physical injuries.” Minhyun continued, brushing over Woojin’s tries to get him to shut up and go back to the corner he had come from. The more Woojin looked at the robot, Daniel’s robot, the one he put years of work into, the tighter his chest felt. 

“However, your neural readings are noteworthy.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Woojin slipped up before he could help himself. He didn’t want answers to questions, he just wanted go back to peace and quiet in his room, without a literal personified reminder of Daniel’s life’s work droning about brain waves. 

“I am not sure.” Minhyun gave back. Before Woojin could ask any more dumb questions, or make Minhyun go back into snooze mode or whatever, the robot’s eyes had sized in on Woojin’s computer. With a few strides, he went over and put two fingers over one of the USB slots. 

“What are you doing?” Woojin mentally slapped himself. 

“Research.” Was Minhyun’s simple reply. 

“You don’t need to do that. I’m fine, really, you can just go back to- to sleep or whatever you do. I’ll talk to Jisung, or to D-- to Daniel’s friends, I’m sure they need you back… at the university. Or something. I-I mean, a lot of their funds were burned for you. Well, not burned. B-But Daniel worked really hard, he--...They probably-- I mean--” The tightness in his chest grew unbearable the more he talked. Why was he explaining this to a robot anyways? Why was it so hard to reasonably explain to a robot? Why did he feel like crying suddenly? He hadn’t cried since the weekend of the fire, he surely wouldn’t start now, in front of a non-sentient being that surely could care less-- 

A hand on each of his shoulders stopped his thoughts. “You should sit down.” Minhyun said. Woojin felt too caught up in his own head to protest and let Minhyun gently push him into his desk chair. 

Another beep sounded through the room. “I have contacted the people on the following list: Lai Guanlin, Lee Daehwi, Bae Jiny--” 

“What?” Woojin turned to stare up at the robot. “Why?” 

“According to my research, contact with friends and family will help your recovery.” 

“I’m not injured.” Woojin reminded him. 

“You have no physical injuries.” Minhyun agreed. “But your psychological state needs treatment. Do you wish to know more?” 

Woojin blinked for a few seconds, then shook his head. That’s exactly what Jisung had said. “You should talk to someone, Woojin. It doesn’t have to be me. It’s probably better if it’s not me.” 

Over and over again in the times he seeked out Woojin’s company, Jisung had offhandedly mentioned therapists in the area, professionals that he thought could help Woojin. Woojin had ignored him. He didn’t want help from strangers, he didn’t want to talk to anyone about this. 

“According to my research, physical contact will also likely help with your recovery.” Minhyun perked up again. He lifted a hand and started slowly patting the top of Woojin’s head. “You will be alright.” He stated, as if it was another scientific fact. A tiny part of Woojin wished it was. 

The steady pat on his head continued even as the robot stayed silent until Woojin had reigned the pressure in his chest in enough to move. He reached up and took a hold around Minhyun’s wrist. “Stop that.” 

Minhyun’s hand dropped and after a few seconds of silence on both of their parts, Woojin carefully tried: “I am satisfied with my care?” 

“I can only deactivate when the treatment is done or has been taken over by a doctor or other professional.” 

Woojin huffed in annoyance. “Of course.” 

“Your friends will be here momentarily.” 

“Can’t you tell them that it was a false alarm, or something?” Woojin tried, but before Minhyun could even attempt to answer, he heard voices outside and only a second later there was a knock on the door. 

“Woojin?” That was Guanlin’s voice. 

With another huff, Woojin resigned to his fate and called for them to come in. 

“Are you alright?” Daehwi immediately blubbered up as soon as the door opened. “We all got a very weird text-message from an unknown number, saying-- Oh, what the hell, Minhyun?!” 

“Hello.” Minhyun answered. He lifted a hand in a short wave. 

“H-hi.” Daehwi gave back a wave of his own, while chancing a look, equal parts confusion and worry, Woojin’s way. 

“Wait.” Jinyoung spoke up. “Did Minhyun contact us?” 

“I did.” The robot replied before Woojin could beat him to it, but he left it at that, so Woojin tentatively explained: “He thought it would be beneficial for my health.” 

“So you’re not healthy?” Guanlin asked, mirroring the look still present on Daehwi’s face. 

“I’m fine.” Woojin assured him. “Really, I tried to get him to deactivate but--” 

“I can only deactivate when the treatment is done or has been taken over by a doctor or other professional.” Minhyun cut in. 

Woojin waved him off. “Yes, I know.”

“So are you well or are you not well?” Guanlin asked again. 

“I’m fine.” Woojin repeated. 

“He does not have any physical injuries.” Minhyun spoke up again. “His psychologi--” 

“You know what?” Woojin spoke way louder than was probably necessary to interrupt a very soft-spoken non-sentient being. “How about we just leave my non-existent injuries be. You guys surely didn’t come here for nothing, we haven’t hung out in ages, why don’t you go ahead and grab a seat in the café and I’ll be down with you in a second?” 

While suggesting it, he already got up and ushered his friends back into the direction of the door before they could protest. As it clicked shut behind them Woojin released a long breath and leaned against it momentarily, trying and failing to gather his thoughts. 

A few seconds later, he stepped over to his bed and flopped himself down on it with a groan. 

“You told your friends you would join them.” Minhyun reminded him, not unfriendly. 

“Sometimes people say things to other people that are not particularly true just to get them off their case.” Woojin mumbled into his comforter. 

“That is called lying.” Minhyun informed him. 

“Maybe so.” 

“You should not lie to your friends.” 

“I wouldn’t have to lie to my friends if you would have just listened to me and not called them. I’m fine, they have no reason to be here.” Woojin could feel himself growing more and more upset. Before Minhyun could open his mouth to repeat his mantra about physical and psychological injuries, Woojin continued: “Just as you have no reason to be here.” 

“I am here to help you.” It sounded so matter-of-fact. It made Woojin even angrier. 

“Well, you can’t.” He replied decidedly. 

“According to my research, distraction might be beneficial to your treatment. Your friends could pose as distraction. Would you like to try out any other form of it?” 

The robot seemed to be trying a different technique and Woojin felt a chance to finally get a breather. 

Quickly, he looked around the room and his eyes landed on his backpack. Buried in the very back, he found the little box that held the last of his microbots that had survived the fire. Jisung had found it in the pocket of his hoodie when he’d done laundry the other week and had carefully given it back to him, mentioning how it was “behaving weirdly.” 

The small black robot looked like it had developed a mind of its own. It kept bouncing against one side of the box, as if determined to break through it. When he had last looked at it, Woojin had different things to deal with and couldn’t be bothered with a malfunctioning piece of technology. 

He still couldn’t be bothered with it, and the robot still hadn’t ceased its bouncing, but now it would maybe do some good after all. 

“See this little thing? Kind of a cousin of yours.” Woojin held out the box to Minhyun. 

Minhyun took it, contemplating over it and turning it this way and that. “I am a robot.” He reminded Woojin. “I don’t have relatives.” 

“I meant that metaphorically. Anyways, it looks like it has somewhere to be, right?” 

“It does.” Minhyun agreed, still turning the box and seemingly marvelling at the robot steadily bouncing in the same direction. 

“Why don’t you go and find out where it wants to go?” Woojin tried to sound placating and amicable, as if that would mean anything to Minhyun. “It would be a great source of entertainment for me, and entertainment means distraction, right?” 

“Do you think this will aid your recovery?” 

“Oh, absolutely.” Woojin nodded. 

Minhyun mirrored his nod and then, Woojin couldn’t quite believe it, really turned around and determinedly walked out of the door. 

The room turned back to silence and Woojin released a small sigh. 

“Sometimes people say things to other people that aren’t necessarily true, just to get them off their case.” He muttered to himself. 

He was very sure the robot was simply malfunctioning after losing all its counterparts in the fire. Minhyun wouldn’t find any place it wanted to go, so either he would return in a few hours of peace and quiet, or he would keep looking until his battery ran out and in the morning Woojin could notify the university. They probably had the robot’s tracking number somewhere in their database and could easily locate him. 

So for now, Woojin’s last worry were his friends, waiting for him in the café downstairs. 

He could just stay were he was. He could lock himself in, or pretend to be asleep, or just tell them he wasn’t feeling up for it. 

But they had come here after all. They’d come even though they’d had plans and even though it hadn’t been Woojin himself who’d asked them to and even though they didn’t know what was wrong and he had pretty much ignored their existence for weeks now. He shouldn’t keep on ignoring them now. 

_“You shouldn’t lie to your friends.”_ Minhyun’s voice echoed in his head. 

With a sigh, he started making his way downstairs. 

He heard something clatter when he walked by the kitchen. “Woojin?” 

He wanted to turn back and hole himself up in his room again, but didn’t get to act upon that instinct because Jisung stepped out of the door then. 

“Hey!” He said, and it sounded apprehensive as if he was scared that one word was too much already. 

Woojin thought he wasn’t wrong. 

“What are you up to?” 

Woojin vaguely gestured towards the front of the café. “I’m going to go meet the others.” 

“Oh!” The surprise was evident on Jisung’s face. “Yeah, that’s- That’s wonderful. You go do that and, if you guys need anything, just call, okay?” 

“Yeah.” Woojin nodded, forcing a small smile to his face. “Yeah sure.” 

The weird lump in his chest that he’d felt talking to Minhyun earlier was back suddenly, and it grew, the closer he got to the café. When he stepped through the door, he could make out Daehwi’s voice over the chatter. He probably would have turned back then and there, had his eyes not met Guanlin’s. 

Immediately, Guanlin’s face lit up. 

“Woojin!” He cheered. “Come here, Daehwi is telling us about how Jaehwan tried to convince Sungwoon to genetically engineer a flying cat!” 

“Sungwoon doesn’t even know anything about genetical engineering.” Jinyoung added, much more somberly, but with a small smile and patted the free chair next to him. 

It was… not what Woojin had expected. As he sat there, listening to Daehwi’s story, wildy adorned with gestures and Jinyoung’s comments and Guanlin’s laughter, as Milktea jumped up on his lap and curled up there as she usually did, as he could see Jisung bustling around the café, it all felt familiar. It felt normal to an extent that Woojin hadn’t thought possible. 

He didn’t know what he had been expecting. His friends mincing their every word around him, feelings and conversations way too heavy for him to carry, probably. The lump in his chest was still there, but nothing happened to make it grow, like he’d feared. To make it disappear, he figured, he needed help. A professional, like Jisung had told him to. Minhyun said he’d be able to deactivate as soon as Woojin’s health had been put in the hands of a doctor too… But that would mean talking about everything. And that would mean nothing would feel normal, and that, frankly, terrified Woojin. 

He buried his hand in the cat’s fur and forced his thoughts to focus back on Daehwi’s words. 

“And then, Sungwoon said-- Is that Minhyun outside there, _again_?” 

The small group turned to the cafés wide windows at once and really: The familiar robot was making his way towards the entrance. 

“How did he get out there?” Guanlin wondered out loud. 

“What is he doing here anyways?” Jinyoung added. “I nearly got a heart-attack seeing him in your room, Woojin.” 

“I don’t know, really.” Woojin replied, his eyes still on Minhyun who was holding the door for an elderly lady exiting the café. “I didn’t know he was here and… active. Shocked me too.” He explains. 

“So what was he doing outside?” Daehwi asked again, as Minhyun approached their table. 

Before Woojin could say anything, Minhyun stopped in front of them. “I found the destination of your tiny robot.” 

“Huh?” Is all Woojin could say in reply. 

Minhyun held out the plastic container. “Your tiny robot. You called it my cousin. I found where it wants to go, like you told me to.” 

“For real?” Woojin asked again. The robot was broken, and he was still very sure it didn’t have an actual destination. What had Minhyun found? 

The robot nodded. “Would you like me to show you, as a further distraction?” 

“Woojin?” Guanlin asked. “What’s the robot man talking about?” 

“My name is Minhyun.” Minhyun informed Guanlin. 

“Oh, sorry. What’s Minhyun talking about?” Guanlin corrected, even though Woojin was very sure Minhyun wasn’t offended by being called ‘robot man’. 

“Uh...Long story.” Woojin opted to say. “I’ll explain some other time.” He didn’t really realize that he was getting out of his seat until Milktea jumped to the floor with an appalled little sound. But then he was standing and looking at the container Minhyun was still holding. The microbot was still going haywire. 

“Alright, let’s go.” Woojin decided. There was no harm in it right? 

A small part of him latched onto the fact that Minhyun had said that distraction would help against the lump in his chest. Maybe he didn’t need to talk to anyone about it. Maybe he could just run around the city with this robotic nurse and everything would become better magically. 

He waved his confused friends goodbye and walked out onto the street before they or Jisung behind the counter could ask any questions. 

“Where to?” He asked Minhyun and the robot held out the plastic box again, walking in the direction the microbot was bouncing. 

It’d been a few weeks since Woojin had been out and about in the city, and months since he last set foot in the smaller alleys. They hadn’t taken very long to leave the bustling streets behind. (With a small tug in his chest, Woojin noted that Daniel had equipped Minhyun with a map of the city as it seemed, and some sort of traffic safety program.) 

The small streets and alleys were just as unfamiliar to Woojin as they always had been, but there was something about the broad daylight and Minhyun walking next to him, that made them seem way safer than they were when he was alone and it was the middle of the night.

“We are nearly at our destination.” Minhyun informed him, his eyes still trained on the box. 

If Woojin didn’t know any better, he would’ve said the microbot seemed even more frantic than it usually had. But that was nonsense. It was broken, and this was nothing more than a useless means of distraction and he really needed to notify the school as soon as he got back home so they could pick Minhyun up and--

“This is where your robot wants to go.” 

Minhyun had stopped in his tracks and was looking up at a huge set of industrial looking wooden doors, seemingly leading into an abandoned warehouse. Some of the windows, high up on the wall, were entirely busted, the ones that weren’t were tinted a dusty brown from age. 

“...Sure thing.” Woojin replied. There was absolutely no reason why the microbot would be drawn to this place that Woojin could think of. Not that he would have expected that, anyways. Not that a small part of him had kind of hoped for something, anything, with a sort of thrill akin to that of a small child going on a treasure hunt. 

“Would you like to go in and find out more?” Minhyun interrupted his thoughts.

Honestly, Woojin just wanted to go home. But for some reason, he didn’t say that. “Uh… would that help my super necessary recovery?” 

In reply, Minhyun shrugged. “It counts as distraction.” 

“You just shrugged.” Woojin told him, and nearly flinched at how dumb that sounded out loud. 

Minhyun didn’t seem to care, he just nodded. “Daniel equipped me with a series of humane gestures that in general do not make any logical sense or the point of which my operating system alone might not comprehend. It makes for a more comfortable atmosphere for the patients when they are met with habits and gestures they are used to.” He explained, as if he was reading it off somewhere. 

Of course Daniel would program a robot to shrug, but not to get around a cramped room efficiently. Woojin smiled to himself for a moment, the thought inspiring comfort and grief alike in his chest. 

Again, Minhyun interrupted his thoughts, as he tended to do. “Would you like to go in and find out more?” He repeated. 

“Uh… Yeah. Yeah okay, let’s check it out.” 

It couldn’t hurt, probably. Jisung would be delighted to hear that he went outside without anyone or anything forcing him to, just exploring a building for the hell of it. Almost like everything was normal. 

After some struggling with the old door, they managed to slip in through a small gap and found themselves exactly where Woojin had expected. A dark, damp hall, that seemed to be mostly empty. There was a second part of it separated by a wall down the middle of the building, the hall behind of it probably just as empty as the one they were standing in. 

There probably wasn’t much exploring to be done here, Woojin thought. 

But Minhyun pointed to the microbot’s container. “It wants to go further to the back.” He informed Woojin. 

“Well…” Woojin looked at the bot and back up at Minhyun. “Let’s go further to the back then, shall we?” 

Maybe it was the same tiny spark of childish hope for something to happen to shake up the tranquil grey his life had been in the past few weeks, that made him venture further into the huge hall. Maybe it was the fact that he couldn’t help but see a naive sort of excitement on Minhyun’s face, not unlike what he’d seen on Daniel’s when they used to go on small adventures like this when they were both younger. He didn’t think even Daniel could program a robot to feel excited, could he?

“I wonder what this hall was used for.” Woojin mumbled out loud after about a minute of walking in the half-darkness. 

“This building used to be a production-site for ships. We are close to the harbour.” Minhyun quipped up from behind him. “That is why the doors are so huge.” 

“That makes sense.” Woojin shrugged. He didn’t question where Minhyun had gotten that information from. A robotic nurse could use weirdly specific historical knowledge about the city it resided in, he supposed. 

“So why did they stop making ships he--” Woojin started, just because the silence in the big room started to kind of get to him. But then they rounded the wall and he stopped in his tracks. 

The second half of the hall wasn’t nearly as dark or damp as the first, instead, it was cast in an eerie sort of blue glow, coming from a very modern and industrial looking box that took up the middle of it. Muffled whirring sounds were audible now that they got closer. 

“What’s that?” Woojin asked into the hall, his voice a low whisper. Something about the situation unsettled him. 

“My database can not find any match.” Minhyun replied, just as loud as he had spoken before, and Woojin flinched. “It is however the exact place where your robot wants to go.” 

And really, the microbot was bouncing exactly into the direction of the whirring box. 

“Let’s go and check it out.” Woojin decided. The tiny spark of childish hope grew brighter, the closer they stepped to the box, the louder the whirring got. 

Despite the creepy atmosphere, this part of the hall seemed to be just as abandoned as the first. The only noise and movement came from within the box and as soon as they rounded one side of it, they could see what its use was. 

It was a small futuristic production site, within the much older and bigger one. This one was very obviously not meant to produce ships or even just rafts. What whirred past them on a production line and fell into an almost filled container were-- 

“My microbots.” 

Woojin forgot all caution he had before as he completely stepped out from behind the box and walked towards the container. 

Behind it, he could see rows and rows of containers just like it, all filled with thousands of replicas of the tiny bot still in his hand. 

“That’s why the bot was drawn to this place.” Woojin said, picking up a hand full of bots from the pile in front of him. “They’re attracted to their kind.” 

Upon a very short further inspection, Woojin could tell that the replicas were identical to the ones he and his friends had made for the showcase. “...But how?” He asked himself out loud. 

Minhyun had stepped up behind him and was looking at the containers himself with what Woojin supposed was mild interest. 

“All microbots except for the one I gave you were destroyed in the fire, how would someone have replicated them to this extent?” 

Of course Minhyun couldn’t have an answer to that, but he still tried. 

“Perhaps they were taken before the fire.” He chanced. “Or during the fire.” 

“During the…” Woojin lifted up another exact copy of his work. 

If someone had used his microbots during the fire, they could have had survived it, had they been fast enough. And most likely there would have been at least some bots that would have survived the fire with them. It would have been easy then, to take the bots and leave while everyone was still caught up in the destruction. 

It didn’t seem as implausible as it should. In fact, it sounded like a carefully calculated plan, every single part of it. 

“Someone…” Woojin started, but his voice gave out at the prospect of his words. “Someone planned the fire, to steal my bots.” 

Before he could say anything more, or Minhyun could react, there was a lot of noise very suddenly. 

Some of the filled containers at the back of the line-up fell over with resounding clangs, some others seemed to be spilling over all of a sudden, as the bots in them came to life. Following the line they were building for themselves, Woojin was soon looking at a figure, standing at the very back of the hall. 

The faint light from the production station didn’t reach them, and Woojin couldn’t make anything out about them except for their all black outfit and that they were wearing a mask. He recognized a light on the side of it, blinking in a pattern that he knew to belong to the neuro-transmitter he had initially connected to his bots for the showcase. The pieces slotted together in his mind. 

Before he could think better of it, he spat out: “You burned down the school! You _killed_ two people to steal my bots! _My brother_ is dead because of _you_!” 

It was like the lump in his chest had caught fire with the words, as he felt an angry kind of surge go through him. When he moved to dash towards the figure, he didn’t think about the fact that they were controlling thousands of microbots, or that they had been capable of killing before, all he could think about was the unbridled rage inside of him. 

He didn’t get very far. After just a step into there direction, he felt cold fingers wrap around his arms, pulling him back and to the side. A sharp tendril of microbots shot past him then, only centimetres from hitting him. 

“This is a safety hazard.” Minhyun declared, all while swiftly pulling Woojin into yet another direction to avoid an attack-- They were being attacked. By _Woojin’s_ microbots. This person who stole Woojin’s invention and _killed Daniel_ was now attacking him. 

The anger spread from his chest to his whole body. 

“We should leave immediately.” Said Minhyun, but Woojin didn’t listen to him, instead he ducked out of his hold and ran towards the figure again. They were smaller than he’d expected, he saw now, maybe he could take them. 

Woojin nearly didn’t see the third tendril snapping towards him, all speed and sharp edges. He only barely managed to avoid it by dropping to the ground, rolling onto his back immediately afterwards. 

This time he saw the attack, but it was too close already, too fast for him to avoid. He couldn’t do anything but to watch it hurrying towards him, to brace for the impact. He closed his eyes, but the impact never came. Instead he only felt a dull thump, and the next moment something yanked on his arm. 

When he opened his eyes again, Minhyun had pulled him to his feet, his mechanical fingers in a vice grip around Woojin’s wrist and he was already pulling him towards the hall’s entrance at a speed Woojin hadn’t thought him capable of. 

“We need to leave immediately.” The robot repeated, in the same even voice that he had spoken in before. It was nearly comical in the light of another sharp tendril of bots whirring past them, only narrowly missing the target. 

Woojin hurried to follow him, willing his legs to keep up with Minhyun’s pace even though they were close to giving out. The rage within him had diminished in the few seconds he had laid on the floor, and left was a hollow burned-out feeling that he couldn’t quite describe. 

He forced himself to focus on running, to focus on avoiding the attacks still raining down left and right as they got closer and closer to the exit, to focus on Minhyun’s back. There was a rip in the fabric of the shirt Daniel had put on him, the material below it slightly dented, even scratched in one space, so deep that Woojin could make out bits of wiring- The robot had shielded Woojin from that 4th attack while he was laying helplessly on the ground. 

The huge doors to the hall were only a few strides away when another attack whirred towards them. Woojin was too slow to avoid it entirely, he felt a sharp burn on his arm where the edges of several bots had grazed him, but Minhyun wasn’t thrown off balance. He kept pulling Woojin along, towards the doors, through them, then suddenly pulled Woojin in front of him and shoved him-- Into the backseat of a car. 

“What the--” Woojin started, but was stopped by arms reaching past him to pull Minhyun into the car as well. The door of the car shut right as Woojin saw another sharp tendril of bots approaching, the impact of it against it rattling the carrosserie. 

“Woojin, are you alright? Are you hurt?” 

“What the hell _was_ that?!” 

“Sungwoon, you might wanna speed up a little.” 

Woojin could only look in between his friends, all seated around him in Sungwoon’s van. Too much was happening and he couldn’t exactly form an answer. 

Sungwoon furiously turned to Jaehwan in the passenger seat. “I’m already way above the speed limit!” 

“Who fucking cares about speed limits in a _chase_?!” Jaehwan threw back, pointing at the rearview mirror. “These things are following us!” 

Sungwoon released a strangled yelp when he realised that Jaehwan was right. It was like a scene straight out of a nightmare, the black bots flooding the alleys behind them like thousands of small shiny bugs, catching up quickly. 

“What’s going on?” Guanlin repeated from the row of seats directly behind Woojin, a slight whine in his voice. “Woojin?” 

“That- it--” Woojin spoke up, all eyes suddenly snapping to him at the sound of his voice. 

Before he could even attempt to say more, Daehwi next to him gasped. “Your arm!” 

As Daehwi grabbed for it, Woojin’s eyes dropped to where the bots had cut him. It wasn’t that bad of a wound, only bleeding a little bit, but it could have been way worse, Woojin knew. 

Before Daehwi could fuss about it more, another cold hand wrapped around Woojin’s arm from the other side. 

“You got hurt.” Minhyun states. “I apologize for that.” While talking, he went to apply what Woojin guessed was some kind of disinfection spray, judging from the smell. That only registered in a very small corner of his mind, as he stared at the robot. 

“You saved my life.” He said, not sure what kind of emotion made its way into his voice, just that there was a lot of it. 

“As your personal healthcare companion, I am responsible for your well-being.” Was all Minhyun replied, as if that explained everything. For him, it probably did. 

“That’s hardcore.” Jaehwan mused from the front seat. 

“So, wh--” Jinyoung, leaning forward to look at Woojin in between his and Daehwi’s seat, started but was cut off by Sungwoon slamming down on the brake. 

“Hold on to something, guys, this could get a little, uh, turbulent!” He called back to the rest of them, voice strained. 

“ _Turbulent_?!” Jaehwan exclaimed, voice shrill. “Your van is thousand years old, Sungwoon, and we have four children in the backseat, I don’t think we can do turbulent!” 

“Well the alternative is being crushed by sharp metal-tendrils of death, Jaehwan!” Sungwoon yelled back at him. “Hold on, everybody!” 

And the next few minutes went by in a fast and stressful blur or alleys, Sungwoon and Jaehwan yelling at each other, Daehwi just yelling at nobody in particular, Jinyoung cursing at every sharp turn Sungwoon took, and Guanlin repeating “This is _crazy_!” Like a mantra for everyone who cared to listen. 

It all didn’t feel real to Woojin. Maybe his brain was still trying to catch up with the fact that he almost died, too occupied to care that he could still very much die. Maybe it was the fact that he just learned that someone had planned to steal his invention and had taken two lives, had taken _Daniel’s life_ in the process. Maybe it was the fact that he had planned to spend the entire day dozing in bed when he woke up this morning, and now he was surrounded by his yelling friends and his bots who wanted him dead and his brain just couldn't connect the two. 

It took him a second to notice that his friends had stopped screaming. It was only eerily quiet safe for the rummaging of the car, until Guanlin, staring out of the rear window, announced: “I’m pretty sure we lost them.” 

“They lost us, if anything.” Jinyoung next to him corrected him. “Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered anymore. Had more important, evil things to do.” 

“Did you just say evil?” Jaehwan asked, something sparking in his eyes that Woojin couldn’t quite decipher. 

“I’m pretty sure they didn’t want to invite us to a cup of tea.” Sungwoon huffed. He leaned forward a bit in the driver seat to get a better view of the street around them. “I don’t even know where the hell we are.” 

“Can you find out and get us home soon?” Daehwi piped up. “I’m stressed and hungry and I kinda wanna call my mom.” 

“I kinda need a toilet.” Guanlin added. 

“My batteries are running low.” Minhyun provided helpfully. 

“Geez, I’m trying guys, but--” Sungwoon started, but Jaehwan interrupted him. 

“I know where we are. And I know just the place we can go.” 

***

“Jaehwan what exactly do you think you’re doing?” Sungwoon hissed, as Jaehwan led them up a pristine white path to what Woojin assumed was a house, but could just as well have been a palace for all the security measures they had simply passed at the gate. There had been a guard at the gate but he had merely glanced up at the group of young men (plus one android) trespassing. 

“I think I’m giving you all a place to stay for the night.” Jaehwan retorted in a normal volume. “Be nicer to me.” 

“I don’t know what planet you’re from, but here you can’t just break onto some rich peoples’ property whenever you feel like it.” Sungwoon informed him. 

“Nobody’s breaking in. It’s not that deep, Woonie.” Jaehwan rolled his eyes as they all finally stopped in front of the huge front doors. 

Without any further explanation, Jaehwan rang the doorbell. 

“Oh sure.” Sungwoon grumbled. “ _Hi! We’re a bunch of college kids, this is our humanoid robot friend,we were just in a chase for our life, running from thousands of mini murder bots and were wondering if you could let us stay in your million-dollar-mansion--_ ” 

The door opening effectively cut Sungwoon’s tirade short. “Forgot your keys again, brat?” 

Stood in the doorway was a man not much older than Jaehwan himself, tall and handsome, fitting right in with the atmosphere of the place as he was sporting a sweater that probably cost more than Woojin made in a year helping at the café. He would have been kind of intimidated, had it not been for the warm spark of mirth in the guy’s eyes as he looked at Jaehwan. 

“Don’t be so rude to me, Seongwoo.” Jaehwan pouted. “I could fire you, you know?” 

“Sure you could.” The guy, Seongwoo, rolled his eyes. “Who are your friends?” 

“From university.” 

“Of course. Why did I even ask? You don’t have any other friends.” 

“I’m literally going to fire you.” Jaehwan said with finality before he brushed past Seongwoo, motioning for the others to follow him. “Anyways guys, welcome to my humble abode, make yourselves feel right at home.” 

“You…” Sungwoon started, as they all stepped into the huge foyer. “You live here?” 

“Yeah.” Jaehwan didn't look up from where he toed of his ratty sneakers. 

“This is your house?” Woojin asked again, just to make sure. “That you live in?” 

“That is generally what people do in their houses, yes.” Jaehwan confirmed. 

“Dude.” Was all Jinyoung contributed. “ _Dude._ ” 

“And who is this?” Daehwi said with a less than subtle look towards Seongwoo, still standing beside the front door and watching them all with poorly veiled amusement. 

“That’s Seongwoo, he’s supposed to be our housekeeper or butler, but he’s actually a nuisance.” Jaehwan threw a look at Seongwoo after he said that, which the other man returned with a wide smile of his own. 

“What he meant to say was, I’m his only friend besides you guys and also I make sure he doesn’t die.”

“So you’re meaning to tell me,” Sungwoon perked up again. “That you live off cheap ramen and wear the same ratty shirt for 2 weeks straight, but you also live in a huge mansion and have a personal butler?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. Do you not listen to me when I talk?” Jaehwan asked, incredulously. 

“Rarely.” Sungwoon replied. He still looked like he couldn’t quite unify the two sides of Jaehwan they had just discovered, and Woojin could relate to the sentiment. He always thought Jaehwan illegally lived somewhere on campus, or under a bridge. 

“I guess that’s fair, considering the circumstances.” Jaehwan shrugged, turning to Seongwoo with some kind of manic smile. “We were just chased through abandoned alleys by a sketchy figure and their killer robots from hell that they stole from Woojin!” 

“Sure you were.” Seongwoo cooed sarcastically before his face fell back into something more serious. “I would’ve thought you’re all a bit too old to play make-believe, but hey, hold on to your youth for as long as you can! Jaehwan lives by that!” 

“It’s what happened!” Jaehwan protested. 

“As ridiculous as it sounds, he’s right.” Sungwoon shrugged. He seemed crestfallen at the fact he had to agree with Jaehwan. “The kids called us, saying that you--” He pointed at Woojin. “Were being kind of weird and running off with Minhyun. We were actually just trying to check on you and collect him to bring back to school.”

“They probably want him back, cost them a fortune.” Jaehwan weighed in. 

“We were definitely not prepared for a near-death-experience.” Sungwoon finished. “But here we are.”

“What happened back there, Woojin?” Daehwi asked. 

“Yeah, and where did the bots even come from? I thought they were all destroyed.” Jinyoung hurried to add. 

“Oh man, you’re actually being serious.” Seongwoo spoke up, before Woojin had a chance to explain anything. “Maybe we should move this to the living room. Anyone want tea?” 

“Is there tea for post-near-death-experiences?” Guanlin asked, genuine interest on his face. 

“I have chamomile.” Seongwoo shrugged. 

“Good enough.”

***

“...This is...A lot.” Jaehwan helpfully supplied after Woojin ended his retellings a good while and a few cups of tea later. 

“We have to tell this to the police. Or the school? Or literally anyone more capable to know what to do here than us?” Guanlin chirped up. 

“What are you gonna tell them?” Jinyoung asked. “‘Someone planned the university fire a few months back specifically to steal a bunch of tiny robots from a teenager and make an evil army of destruction with them, we have no proof, but they nearly killed all of us?’”

Woojin had to admit that that sounded ridiculous, but it had been what happened, and he himself was just at as much at a loss of words as Guanlin. They had to do _something_ , that much was sure. 

“I’m not letting them get away with this.” He announced quietly, his eyes fixed on his tea. “I don’t know why they did it, but we have to do something to stop this.” 

“But what?” Daehwi spoke up. “Jinyoung is right, nobody will believe us. And what can a bunch of university kids do against something like this?”

“I don’t know.” Woojin admitted. “But--”

“I don’t think there’s a but here, Woojin. This is too big for us, we really shouldn’t get involved--”

“They’re responsible for the fire.” Woojin interrupted him, louder this time. As it had been for the past months, the lump in his chest twisted, sparked, threatened to burn. “They’re responsible for- For Daniel’s death.” He looked around the room, before repeating, with more conviction than before: “I’m not letting them get away with this.” 

It was quiet for a few seconds and Woojin immediately regretted his words. He didn’t want to expect them to share the weight of what had been in his mind up until now. He hadn’t expected it from them in the past two months, and it wouldn’t be fair to do so now. Of course, the situation had changed, but he could still deal with this by himself. Just as he was about to open his mouth to tell them to forget about it, to tell them to forget about this whole thing, to just go home and not worry, Sungwoon reached for his hand on the table. 

Woojin hadn’t realized he had balled it up to a fist, until Sungwoon opened it to carefully lace their fingers together.

“So what’s your plan?” Sungwoon asked, just as careful. 

There was no doubt behind his words, like before, no caution, no underlying warning. His voice was tentative, yet assured, quiet, yet strong enough to convey that he understood, that no matter what Woojin would say next, he would understand that too. Sungwoon squeezed his hand shortly and it was assurance that he was there, and would be there no matter what Woojin’s answer was. 

He let his eyes wander from Sungwoon to the rest of his friends, and instead of the burdened pity he expected, he found the same thing in their gazes that had been in Sungwoon’s voice- understanding, support, assurance. 

Woojin understood that he may have never asked them to help him carry the weight of his mind, but in their own ways they had still done it, even before today, and they would continue to do so tomorrow and after that and as long as it was there. 

This realisation was what made him backtrack, made him discard the excuses already on the tip of his tongue, the “I’m fine” and the “Forget about it.” It made him say: “I’m not sure.” and it made him ask: “But will you help me?” 

He could see the answer in their faces, but before anyone could actually reply, Jaehwan cut in: “Guys, do you know what this is? Do you understand what is literally happening right now?”

Everyone turned to him, question evident in their eyes, as was a little annoyance. 

“This is the climax of our superhero origin story.” Jaehwan continued, his eyes shining with excitement. 

Sungwoon opened his mouth to protest, but Guanlin was faster: “He’s not entirely wrong, you know? We were just chased by someone trying to kill us with stolen technology, and now we’re planning to hold them accountable for their actions.” 

“Their actions that affected us, personally.” Jinyoung added, contemplative. 

“ _And_ they were wearing some kind of mask and a super long black coat!” Jaehwan added. 

Sungwoon sighed. “That is absolutely irrelevant.” 

“No it isn’t! Even visually they were very clearly a supervillain!” 

“He has a point.” Woojin weighed in. If he ignored what exactly they were talking about, he could nearly pretend this was their normal everyday kind of banter and it brought a small smile to his face. 

“We’re forgetting a minor detail here.” Daehwi suddenly spoke up from beside him. “This person may be a supervillain, but none of us has ever been bitten by a radioactive animal, or is a deity, or from space, or a trained assassin.” He looked at the rest of them. “We’re not superheroes.” 

“How do you know none of us is from space?” Was Jaehwan’s defiant reply, but everyone elected to ignore it. 

Seongwoo suddenly cleared his throat. Woojin had forgotten that the older man was even there, he had stayed quiet for the duration of his story and the discussion that followed it. 

“None of you may be the Hulk, or something.” He said, his face schooled into something very serious that Woojin wasn’t sure he should take for that. “But the four of you are scientific geniuses-” He gestured to Woojin, Jinyoung, Daehwi and Sungwoon. “And Jaehwan is a huge sarcastic asshole, with money.” He gestured around the huge room and finally, his facade broke and a grin replaced it. “Together, you’d make a pretty solid Iron Man.” 

“Literally no one asked you--” Jaehwan started, but Jinyoung held up a hand. 

“He has a point.” 

Jaehwan blinked. “Does he?”

“He does.” Woojin agreed. The feeling of purpose was welling up within him. “We may not have any supernatural or extraterrestrial powers, but… Sungwoon works with lasers. Daehwi could probably whip up three different kinds of bombs with just stuff he finds in Jaehwan’s kitchen.” He threw a hand out to point at Minhyun. The robot had been sitting with them, completely silent, seemingly observing the situation or just in stand-by until now. “He deflected the microbots earlier, and all that happened was a little dent, we could use that for something!” 

He felt the jittery kind of excitement slowly leaping over at the others while he was talking. “This could actually work, guys.” 

The few seconds of silence that followed were heavy, pregnant with something that felt bigger than them, yet they were so close to being on top of the world. 

It was Guanlin, who broke it first. “I’ll help!” 

As soon as the attention turned to him, he shrunk back into his seat a bit. “I mean, I don’t know what I would do, I’m barely passing Physics, but-” He looked up at Woojin with earnest eyes. “I always have your back.”

“I know you do, Lin.” He replied with a small smile. 

“So do we, Woojin.” Daehwi spoke up, conviction evident in his voice. The rest of them nodded. 

“So is this is?” Jaehwan asked, and Woojin could tell from his tone that he was on the edge of his seat with excitement. “Are we doing this?”

Weirdly enough, all gazes turned to Woojin, waited for his decision.

He nodded, once. 

 

 **{I’m still comparing your past to my future}**  
Big cities left their inhabitants with only very small spaces to work on their superhero gear. They all had been cooped up in either the university’s laboratory, Woojin’s garage or Jaehwan’s garden for the better part of two weeks, changing locations whenever a professor grew overly suspicious, or a neighbour complained about the noise, or Seongwoo complained about the state of his tulips after Jinyoung had accidentally zoomed through them. 

It wasn’t ideal, but somehow they had managed to put together something incredible, something more than they had expected. 

“Okay, Daehwi. Ready?” Woojin called over to the younger boy, while adjusting the camera. Sungwoon had insisted they film their progress, for science, and what-not. 

“Uh, I think so?” Daehwi called back, adjusting his protective visor nervously. This was his third test-run, and the other two had not went all too well. 

“It’s gonna work this time!” Jinyoung yelled from Jaehwan’s patio, a safe distance away. For the first test he had stood directly besides Daehwi, and there was still some red irritations on his skin that wouldn’t heal. 

“You rock!” Guanlin cheered from beside him, enthusiastically lifting his glass of lemonade. 

Daehwi straightened up with a deep breath and turned back to Woojin with a decisive nod. “I’m ready.” 

“Okay, on the count of three.” Woojin said, pressing the record button. “One. Two. Three!”

Daehwi started running towards the center of the garden, where the adults had set up a sort of parkour earlier this week. They had made Minhyun do all the heavy lifting, but the robot hadn’t seemed to mind. 

The camera automatically followed the movement, clearly detecting Daehwi’s orange and pink form to be the subject of the recording. Woojin had to say, he was still kind of on Jinyoung’s side of the discussion they’d had about their suits’ colour schemes- neon colours seemed too bright, too attention seeking, when their main objective was to catch someone- but as they started their tests, he could see the appeal Jaehwan and Daehwi had clearly seen: It looked really cool. 

The afternoon sunlight reflected in Daehwi’s visor as the boy dashed towards the obstacles, not turning his head towards where he was procuring a solid looking ball from the bag on his side. He had made that mistake during the first test-run and had promptly ran into the first obstacle. 

After that, Daehwi had spent two whole days memorising the buttons on the modified bag,carrying it around the whole day and typing away on it while doing other things. It had made for quite the funny picture, but it had been worth it. 

The bag wasn’t so much a bag, it was a small piece of technology, filled with basically everything Daehwi had in his part of the laboratory, confined into the smallest space possible. By pressing the buttons on its front, the machine produced colourful balls of chemicals that were completely safe for Daehwi’s gloved hands to touch, but could be lethal as soon as they hit target. 

The targets, in this case, were random pieces of plywood Seongwoo had found in the back of the garden’s storage hut, some of them painted with faces and monsters, from when Guanlin had had a day off school and he and Seongwoo had had too much time and acrylic paints on their hands. 

The paint on one of these obstacles was bubbling and sizzling right now, as the wood beneath it slowly disintegrated with the impact of Daehwi’s first missile, the boy himself zooming past it towards the second. 

“He’s doing well!” Guanlin exclaimed. “He is doing well, right?” He asked again, turning to the rest of their group. 

“It looks like it.” Sungwoon confirmed, taking a sip of lemonade without taking his eyes off Daehwi. Five obstacles were already impaired in some way or another. 

“What do you say?” Woojin turned to Minhyun while stepping onto the patio and sitting down in what had become some sort of audience area for their test-runs.

“Statistically he should be able to make it through the entire parkour, if he keeps up this speed and efficiency.” Minhyun stated, also watching Daehwi attentively, before turning to Guanlin. “He is doing well.” 

Guanlin whooped, nearly splashing all of them with what was left of his lemonade, while Daehwi approached the last two obstacles they had set up for him. The very last one was wearing a makeshift mask like the one Woojin saw on the figure in the warehouse. Daehwi aimed for its lower half, encasing what would be its arms and legs, had it been human, with some sort of baby-blue silicon before simply bounding over and taking the mask. Triumphantly he held it up for the rest of them to see, as they emerged into cheers. 

Daehwi took off his helmet as he made his way towards the patio. Jaehwan thrusted a glass of lemonade into his hand, ruffling his already messed up hair even more. “That’s my boy!” 

“You did it!” Guanlin yelled as he and Jinyoung caught Daehwi in a hug before he could settle down. 

“That’s it then, isn’t it?” Sungwoon asked, with a wide grin on his face. “Daehwi was the last one still missing to succeed?” 

They all turned towards Woojin, who checked the last box on his SmartScreen with a smug smile. 

“Does that mean you’ll leave my garden alone now?” Seongwoo perked up, his voice hopeful.

Before Woojin could confirm or deny that, Jinyoung said: “That’s not entirely true though. We still haven’t seen what Woojin has been doing all this time.”

“I have.” Guanlin grinned. “And it’s awesome.”

“So?” Daehwi prodded, looking at Woojin expectantly. 

“It _is_ pretty awesome.” Woojin replied, mirroring Guanlin’s grin. 

As the others had used mostly their own workspaces for their projects, Woojin had tinkered away only in his garage for the last two weeks, when the rest had left. Only Minhyun, as he was part of it, Jisung, as he made sure Woojin would eat and sleep at some point, and Guanlin, as he simply wouldn’t leave him alone, knew what exactly he had been doing. 

With a huff, he got up. “Follow me.” He instructed. 

It had taken some time for the idea to get to where he wanted it to be, mainly because Minhyun had been way more adamant about his protests than an android should have been. Woojin had finally convinced him that the modifications were absolutely necessary, seeing as they were crucial to catching the masked thief and that in turn would help Woojin’s well-being immensely. 

“First of all, I enhanced the scanner Minhyun already had. Guanlin accidentally found out that Minhyun had scanned the person’s vital signs back in the warehouse.” 

“Biologically female, in their late thirties, has an allergy against peanuts.” Guanlin recited happily. It had been rather euphoric when Guanlin had tried to find out if Minhyun had some sort of recording of the incident, anything that could help them, and had gotten this out of him. 

“With the enhanced scanner he can cover the whole city, until he finds a match.” Woojin explained as the group made their way to a part of the garden not taken up by plywood. 

“But that’s not even the best part!” Guanlin was basically bouncing on his heels as he hurries alongside Woojin. “Show them the thing!” 

“I will in a second!” Woojin replied, trying to sound annoyed but not quite able to keep the excited smile off his own face. 

Creating this had been tiring, and had seemed impossible at first, but now that it was done, Woojin was pretty sure that it was the best thing he had ever created. It had kept him busy, and that together with the goal he was working towards, had done a great deal to ease the weight on his chest, to untie the knots in his stomach, to finally pull his thoughts out of the slump they had been in for the past few months. He was excited to share the finished product with his friends now, finally. 

When they had reached the free patch of grass in the wide expanse of garden, Woojin motioned for the others to stay put, as he stepped in front of them, pulling Minhyun with him. “Alright, buddy, let’s show them what we worked on.” 

“My name is Minhyun.” The robot reminded him, as he tended to do. 

“I know, that’s just something people say.” Woojin explained absentmindedly while fussing with a few switches on the seemingly inconspicuous contraption around Minhyun’s wrist. 

“I see.” Minhyun nodded, and after a short pause: “Buddy?” 

“Yeah!” Woojin grinned up at him. “I’m your buddy.” 

Minhyun nodded again, as Woojin turned to the others and started explaining: “I kept thinking about that thing Seongwoo said when we started this whole business.” 

“He said a lot of things.” Sungwoon pointed out. 

“Yeah, he never shuts up.” Jaehwan added.  
“Well, apparently I inspired important developments here, so maybe _you_ should shut up.” Seongwoo shot back, crossing his arms. Then, he looked back at Woojin. “But what exactly did I say?” 

“You talked about Iron Man.” Woojin replied. “I actually went and rewatched those movies--” 

“Without us?” Jinyoung interrupted him. 

“Oh man, when this is over we should have a science-fiction oldies movie night. I haven’t rewatched Infinity War in at least five years.” Daehwi chirps. 

Jaehwan furrowed his brows. “Why would you want to rewatch that? It sucked.” 

“Can we watch the second Black Panther movie too?” Guanlin threw in. 

“We _always_ watch that.” Sungwoon whined.

“Because it’s that good.” Woojin jumped in, before Guanlin could do so. “But guys, that’s kind of not the subject right now.” 

“Right. Seongwoo talked about Iron Man. And?” 

“And it made me come up with this.” Woojin continued, lifting up his hands and displaying the same dark red contraption that was around Minhyun’s wrist on both of his own. 

“You made chunky friendship bracelets for you and Minhyun?” Seongwoo asked. “That’s adorable, but what does that have to do with--” 

He didn’t get to finish his question, because Woojin grinned and pressed a button on the ‘friendship bracelets’, Minhyun automatically doing the same by his side. Immediately, the contraptions started to expand up his arms, whirring until they eventually met over Woojin’s chest and his back. He did the same to a way smaller piece of machinery by his ear, which had looked like a chunky earphone up until now. Now it expanded into a protective helmet, the same dark red colour as the metal on his arms, complete with a visor not unlike Daehwi’s. 

Something similar had happened on Minhyun’s side, the metal reaching up his left arm and up to frame only a part of his head and one eye. Woojin had found out that the built that the robot had already had was enough protection, he only needed the parts of the suit necessary to connect Minhyun to his own. 

He explained as much to his friends. “With this-” He pointed at the part of the armour around Minhyun’s eye. “He can transmit readings and data directly here.” He pointed to his own visor. “This little part at the side of his head let’s us sync up while in action. Sort of like we were trained together in combat.”

“I saw them train.” Guanlin chirped up again. “It’s pretty badass.” 

“But how does that work?” Sungwoon asked. “Minhyun was built as a nurse, I doubt he’d be programmed for combat.” 

“He wasn’t.” Woojin nodded, tapping the bit of metal armour over Minhyun’s chest. The flash drive hatch opened, revealing Daniel’s bright pink one still there as it always had been, as well as a new, red one. “It’s all on there.” Woojin said. 

When he had finished programming his own flash drive he had briefly considered taking out Daniel’s entirely. “My programming prevents me from harming a human being.” Minhyun had told him when Woojin had explained the combat programming to him. 

But in his head, Daniel’s words had echoed, telling him how long he had spent on the programming, how that flash drive made Minhyun what he was, how he was gonna help a lot of people. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to remove it. Minhyun wouldn’t have to hurt anyone anyways, he would just have to protect. He was more than capable of that.

“That is _so cool_.” Daehwi marvelled. 

“So what are we doing now?” Guanlin was barely not jumping in his spot. 

“Now we… find the bad guy?” Woojin said, checking on screen even though he knew exactly that he hadn’t made any notes on how to proceed after this. He’d been pretty occupied with building armour for himself and a robot, and helping his friends do the same. 

“That’s anti-climatic.” Jaehwan huffed. 

Seongwoo rolled his eyes. “You’re anti-climatic.” 

“Oh, great comeback, this has to be why my father hired you.” Jaehwan shot back, his voice dripping with sarcasm. 

They made their way back onto the patio like that, Jaehwan and Seongwoo bickering, the others collecting the pieces of their suits. Woojin pressed a few buttons on his own armour until it shrunk back into the base pieces on his wrists and made sure that Minhyun did the same, before he noticed Sungwoon’s eyes on him. 

“Yeah?” He asked. 

Sungwoon shook his head with a little smile. “Daniel would be proud of you.” He said, turning away then and following the others. It left Woojin standing in the middle of the garden for a few moments, his heart beating slightly off beat, until he felt cold fingers on his shoulder. 

“You should eat.” Minhyun said. “According to my data, you require sugar. You are also slightly dehydrated.” 

“Yeah.” Woojin replied weakly. “Yeah, you’re right. Thanks.” 

And he took off towards the patio. 

***

It was the week after, when everyone’s celebratory mood after all of their armour was completed successfully had somewhat mellowed out, that Woojin got to actually proceed with his somewhat-plan. 

“This is very high up.” Minhyun noted, leaning over the railing of the roof they were standing on a bit. 

“And it’s not for falling off.” Woojin pressed, while pulling Minhyun back by his arm. 

“You are stressed.” Minhyun noted. “You told me before that you have acrophobia. Why did you want to come up here?” 

Woojin didn’t remember ever talking to Minhyun about his severe fear of heights, but he supposed it had come up in the last few weeks when the robot hadn’t really left his side. Woojin had gotten so used to Minhyun’s presence by his side, that he just tended to talk mindlessly at times, just bouncing ideas off him or simply enjoying the fact that someone was listening to him no matter how trivial his thoughts were. 

“We had to get to a high up venture point for your scanner to get the whole city.” Woojin gritted out in between his teeth. 

They were on top of the city’s highest building. A few metres to their left was a café for tourists, from where they could enjoy a view of the whole city. Woojin really didn’t understand how anyone could enjoy to eat their food this far from the ground, only the thought of eating made him more nauseous than he already was. 

“Let’s just get this over with.” He mumbled and tapped Minhyun’s arm lightly. “Do your thing, buddy.” 

It wasn’t anything flashy that happened, to the people in the café it probably just looked like a pair of young men, one of whom was enjoying the view, the other one terrified out of his wits, enjoying the nice weather and the air up here. Minhyun turned this way and that, his face passive as it always was, before turning completely on his heels to face Woojin.

“I have found one match in the radius of ten miles.” 

“Well, it would have been very creepy if you would have found more than one person with the exact same vitals as this one.” Woojin nodded, then grabbed Minhyun’s arm and pulled him towards the platforms entrance. “How about we go down at least 40 floors and you tell me all about it?” 

“You said that gathering this information is crucial.” Minhyun reminded him, but he followed Woojin towards the elevators anyways. 

As soon as the elevator doors closed behind them and Woojin’s heart calmed down to a somewhat normal rate he huffed: “So? What did you find?” 

“We are not 40 floors down yet.” Minhyun said, his attention on the panel of buttons next to him. He lifted up his hand and would have probably pressed each single one of them, had Woojin not pulled his hand away. 

“Buttons fascinate me.” Minhyun stated and it sounded nearly apologetic. 

“I know, buddy. I know.” Woojin sighed. “The 40 floors thing was an exaggeration, I can listen to you now. Where are they?” 

“The patient is about 10 miles from where we saw them last.” 

“Oh, they’re not a patient. You’re not supposed to heal them, or anything.” Woojin absentmindedly told him, his thoughts already on the procedure of their plan. If it was only ten miles from the warehouse, it couldn’t be far out of town and they should be able to get there pretty fast. Seongwoo had offered them his car as well as the Kim family’s private helicopter for transportation and they had graciously accepted, right after Sungwoon had whacked Jaehwan over the head for never mentioning he owned a helicopter. Transportation was really no problem for them, and--

“They have injuries. I am required to aid patients with injuries.” Minhyun interrupted Woojin’s thought process. 

“Huh?” Woojin blinked. “What kind of injuries?” 

“Burns to their skin, mostly.” 

“Makes sense, they were in the fire…” Woojin started but the thought made something bitter coil up in his chest. “They’re not a patient, Minhyun. They’re a- A subject, if you will. Not for healing, just for finding.” He waved the conversation off and reached in his bag for his screen to look at some maps of the location Minhyun found, but Minhyun cut him off again. 

“I also found something else.” 

“And what’s that?” If Minhyun was going to tell him about a slight cold the microbot thief had caught, he would probably tape his mouth shut. 

“I found a set of vitals that showed shocking similarities--” 

“Does this have to do with the person we’re looking for?” Woojin cut him off. 

“No.” 

“Then we really don’t have time for it right now, Minhyun. We need to put this show on the road or they’ll have moved and we have to do this whole thing all over again.” He said while clicking away on his screen. If they had to run Minhyun’s scanner again, he’d force one of the others to bring the robot up here. No way was he going to do it again. 

“This information could be crucial to your personal--” Minhyun started again as the elevator dinged. 

“We can deal with it later. Pinky promise, Hyunie.” Woojin assured him. He didn’t actually think Minhyun cared much for assurance, or nicknames for that matter, but the robot said nothing more, just nodded and followed Woojin out of the building. 

*** 

“Oh man, we’re really doing this. This is happening. Oh man. Dude. Dude this is real, this is happening, this--” 

“ _I swear to god, Jaehwan, shut your mouth or I will._ ” Sungwoon hissed. 

Woojin could feel the tension filling the van as it tuckered away through the streets. His friends were just as anxious for what was about to happen as him, just as unsure of themselves probably. But despite all the nerves, he believed in them and what they had worked for these past few weeks. 

It had only been a question of logistics, really, a matter of questions after Woojin and Minhyun had returned from their ‘recon mission’ as Jaehwan liked to call it. The others had busied themselves with finding possible suspects, a subject they had mulled over for a while now. 

“I’m 100% certain it’s Shin Yumi.” Sungwoon had said one day, over lunch. 

“And I’m 100% certain that that’s bullshit.” Jinyoung had thrown back. The discussion had been going on for a while at this point. “She’s too much of a public figure to risk something like this.”

“Also what we’ve seen so far doesn’t really seem like the brand of a multi-millionaire entrepreneur.” Daehwi had weighed in. 

Jinyoung had nodded. “We shouldn’t focus on someone big like that and risk missing details about all of this. Right, Woojin?” 

Woojin hadn’t been able to say that he really disagreed with any of them. He could understand why Sungwoon was suspecting Shin Yumi, seeing as she had clearly been very interested in the bots. But arson to get a product she’d been denied really didn’t seem like an action appropriate for someone wealthy enough to probably buy out the entire school. 

On top of that, every detail about what they were doing was simply too important to focus on assumptions. Only if they could define the variables in their plan, they would get somewhere with it, and Woojin wouldn’t accept even the possibility of failure, when this much was riding on it, when the person responsible for Daniel’s death was still out there. 

In the end the list of suspects had been left mostly vague, mostly empty, and in the end it hadn’t mattered. They were going to confront them, whoever they were. 

“It’s the warehouse closest to the water.” Guanlin informed the rest of them from the passenger seat, his eyes trained on the GPS in front of him. “It’s huge, you basically can’t miss it.” 

“There is no further information about our destination in my database.” Minhyun spoke up. 

“We know that, Minhyun. Please stop repeating it.” Guanlin all but whined. Seongwoo and him had been designated the roles of their ‘base team’ meaning they would remain in the van and overseeing everything from there while the others went into the warehouse. Guanlin took his role very seriously, had done his best to gather as much information on every little part, and the fact there was absolutely nothing to be found about the warehouse they were visiting was a thorn in his eye. 

It was one of the things Woojin was the most suspicious about. No information whatsoever usually meant it had been specifically wiped, and that usually promised things bigger than a group of high schoolers and college students should get involved with. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the possibility that they were chasing after a government operation or anything of the likes, it seemed too messy for that, but the lack of information unsettled him. 

Seongwoo stopped the engine right next to the second to last building on the pier. In front of them was a vast open area, in more active ages a storing space for containers, probably, and behind that a massive warehouse, seemingly deserted. There were no windows anywhere, none of the lights on the outside were on and the front gate was closed off with a thick chain. A bright neon sign marked the building as closed down. 

The sign was left in two pieces on the floor after Sungwoon cut through it, with only a slight wince. 

For Sungwoon’s suit, he and Woojin had worked out a way to incorporate Sungwoon’s plasma tech into his armour, so it could be used as weapons as well as as protection. Sungwoon had taken a handful of tries to get a feel for how to use the plasma blades, basically extensions of his arms, and it had taken a lot of convincing from everyone else’s side that they trusted him with the suit. It was held in muted blue tones, courtesy to Seongwoo throwing in a random colour while Sungwoon had refused to pick one. Woojin guessed he did it only to spite Jaehwan who had given them a whole rant about the importance of their ‘colour-coding’ earlier that day. 

Jaehwan had accepted the “boring” colour choice eventually when Daehwi had pointed out how it brought out the bright blue and green colouring on Jaehwan’s own armour as that much more exciting.

Jaehwan’s suit didn’t really need any more excitement, Woojin thought. It was by far the most intricately built one out of all of them, equipped with something akin to a flame thrower on Jaehwan’s right, and something akin to a freeze ray on his left. Woojin hadn’t really understood why either of these features should have been given to Jaehwan of all people, but he had insisted they were of utmost importance, and had proven to be able to work them in training, so they had let him be. 

As they stepped into the warehouse, and the gate closed behind them, Woojin found himself thankful for the little luminary applications on Jinyoung’s armour right in front of him. If it weren’t for them, it would have been pitchblack around them until Minhyun turned on the light device Woojin had installed into his helmet and illuminated the area around them. 

“Do you want me to go ahead and check out the hall?” Jinyoung turned to Woojin, hand already hovering over the small control panel on his arm that allowed him to activate the speeding mode on his armour. It worked with a similar technology of magnetic suspension as the bikes Jinyoung usually worked with. 

Woojin shook his head. “We should stay together until we know what exactly is going on here. Let’s go.” 

As a group, they made their way through the mostly deserted first hall. From what Woojin could see in the little light they had, the layout of the building was separated into three halls. The first one was nearly eerily empty, and it started to feel like they were in the wrong place right up until Sungwoon opened the gate to the second hall. 

“Oh my god.” Daehwi breathed behind Woojin. “What is all of this?” 

What they walked in on seemed like a futuristic war-scene. Minhyun’s light showed only a small part of it, decimated pieces of machines littering the floor, the wall right next to the gate entirely ripped open, the wiring in it exposed. 

“Do you guys think there’s electricity here?” Woojin said. Before he even finished the sentence, the hall is flooded in white light. 

“I found a lightswitch.” Minhyun announced from where he was standing by the wall. 

The rest of the hall looked just like the area around them, destroyed. 

“This isn’t normal production equipment.” Sungwoon said. He was kneeling next to what looked like a severed control panel. “We can’t even get top-notch tech like this in the labs.” 

“Some serious shit went down here.” Jaehwan deducted, kicking a piece of the wall across the ground. 

Woojin noticed a mostly intact metal staircase then, leading up to a platform, mostly closed off with plexiglass. One window was shattered. 

“That up there looks like a control base.” He told the others and motioned for them to follow him up. “Maybe we can find out what happened here.” 

“They should have video records, if there were experiments conducted here.” Jinyoung muttered as soon as they entered the room filled with more control panels as well as a full wall of computer screens. Him and Daehwi got to work on the computers, as the rest of them made their way around the room for any other clues. 

“We shouldn’t stay here too long.” Sungwoon said when Woojin was in earshot. “We don’t know where exactly that person is, and they could easily corner us--” 

“Guys.” Daehwi called them over. “I think we found something.” 

“Video records, like I said.” Jinyoung explained as soon as they were all gathered around the screens. “These are the most recent ones, probably showing what happened here. They’re from about 5 months ago.” 

He pressed a few buttons and the image flickered to life. 

It showed the same room they were in, but before it had gotten turned upside-down. The room on the screen was orderly, nearly sterile white, and illuminated by cold bright light. The cameras caught a group of people standing together, all of them in uniforms yet very different ones. Woojin could make out what looks like a military official, the impeccable suit of a politician, at least three pristine lab coats, before his eyes halted on the figure all the others seemed to be listening to. 

“That’s Shin Yumi.” Sungwoon hissed. “I told you she has something to do with this.” 

“She looks in charge there.” Woojin thought out loud. “It looks like she’s explaining something.” 

_”...And as you’ll be able to witness today, Ladies and Gentlemen: Teleportation is no longer just wishful thinking.”_ Shin’s metallic voice filtered through the air then. 

“Teleportation?!” Daehwi repeated, but Woojin held up a hand to shush him. 

_”And this is entirely safe?”_ A man at the front of the group asked, throwing a weary look to all the machinery set up in the middle of the room. 

_”Absolutely, Sergeant. Our team has worked on this for months on end and all readings assure that we are ready for this first full-on test run.”_

_”So this has never been tested on a human being before?”_ A woman spoke up. 

_”No, but like I said, we are ready. The young man chosen for this run is fully aware of the risks, which are minimal, might I add, and our full team gave the green light.”_ Shin’s smile on the screen was strained, and Woojin could guess how much she had to force herself not to lash out at the no doubt important people surrounding her. 

_”Actually-”_ she continued. _”Jihoon, would you come here for a second?”_

A boy, Woojin didn’t think he was much older than him, walked over to the small group. He was dressed in what looked like a peculiar mix of a spacesuit and protective gear for bikers. 

_”Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Park Jihoon, he has agreed to run this experiment with us and trained alongside our scientists for the past two months.”_ Shin pushed the boy forward and Jihoon hurried to bow several times. 

“Did she say Park Jihoon?” Sungwoon asked. 

“Why?” Woojin turned to him. 

“That’s Kahi’s son.” Jaehwan chipped in. “He used to hang around the lab a lot a while ago. Scary kid.” 

Sungwoon shook his head. “He was pretty chill. He hasn’t been around in forever though, I wonder why…” 

“Possibly we’re going to find out. Focus.” Daehwi called their attention back to the screen. 

The group asked a few more questions, directed at Shin and Jihoon alike, before the boy excused himself and the rest of the group retreated to the very observation area Woojin stood in right now. 

There was other clips playing in real time on other screens, Woojin supposed there were cameras on the actual experiment and the observation bay closer to it, but their attention stayed drawn to the same first one, as a scientist came up to Shin and said: _”Miss, there is an anomaly with the readings, we haven’t seen one like it before and we can’t trace its source.”_

_”Does this influence the risk of the experiment in any way?”_ a voice from the group immediately perked up. 

Woojin could see in the frown etching itself onto Shin’s features, that she would have taken any risk, no matter how big. She confirmed his suspicion when she opened her mouth and assured: _”We will continue with the experiment as planned, there is absolutely nothing to worry about, is there?”_ She directed the last part at the scientist next to her in an icy tone, and Woojin was pretty sure he could see the shiver running through the man, before he quickly shook his head and shuffled off. 

“Oh, I don’t have a good feeling about this.” Daehwi murmured under his breath. Woojin silently agreed. 

The group took their places in the room, as did the scientists, and Woojin could feel their anticipation seeping through the screen as several machines whirred to life. The screen directly to the side showed Jihoon, standing on a platform in the middle of a few machines. The whirring went on for about a minute, and suddenly, Jihoon wasn’t standing on the platform anymore. A gasp ran through the group, and Woojin heard Jinyoung inhale sharply in front of him. 

_”These are the fruits of our scientists’ hard work of the past months.”_ Shin started to explain, the smugness clear in her voice. _”As you can see-”_ she continued, but suddenly a shrill alarm cut through the air.

Several people started talking at once, the alarm never stopped shrilling, Woojin could make out smoke coming from several machines. Faintly, Shin’s voice carried over everything, trying to call the staff to order, and to make everyone calm down, but Woojin couldn’t even begin to believe that it would have worked. Jihoon was still gone, he noted. 

It was like all the noise on the screen grew louder, grew in a crescendo, built tension. Then, a loud bang, several screams, and the screen went black. 

They stood there in absolute silence for a few moments, none of them knew what to say or how to proceed now, none of them knew what to make of what they just saw. 

Jaehwan was the first to speak up. “Well, that was fucked up.” 

“So, we’re really dealing with Shin Yumi here?” Jinyoung asked into the room then. 

Sungwoon nodded. “She is probably bitter that this experiment failed so colossally. Maybe she’s going to use the microbots to try again. It would explain why she was so pissed when you wouldn’t sell them… I bet a lot of her funds went into this, she wouldn’t just let it go to waste.” 

“So she accepted the fire and its consequences as collateral damage.” Woojin gritted out between clenched teeth. 

He had been angry, furious, ever since he found out about the cause of the fire, yes, but now that he had a name, a face, a motive for it, his insides were on fire. 

“Woojin.” Minhyun spoke up. He was standing a bit to the side from the rest of them and hadn’t said anything for the duration of the video. 

Probably, he was going to tell Woojin that his blood pressure was off balance and would recommend him some breathing exercises. The thought somehow only fed the flames in his chest, and he snapped: “Not now, Minhyun.” 

“Woojin.” The robot repeated. When Woojin whirled to face him and tell him to shut up, he wasn’t looking at him, but into the hall behind them. “We are not alone.” He stated. 

It was a terrifyingly ominous statement, and the strangled noise Daehwi let out before Woojin even got to turn around only affirmed that. 

The hall had been stark white in the light when they arrived. Now it was speckled with black all over and Woojin was reminded of small insects again, crawling up the walls, over the broken machinery, towards them. In the center of it all stood the same figure, willing the bots. She was in all black and the mask was resting on her face just as before, but now Woojin knew what was underneath, and it fueled his anger. 

Briefly he wondered how Guanlin and Seongwoo hadn’t warned them beforehand, but then he realized that their coms had been offline ever since they entered this hall. He sent out a quick prayer for the two of them being okay out there, before he snapped back to the matter at hand. 

“It’s Shin!” Jaehwan exclaimed. 

“What’s the plan?” Daehwi asked at the same time. 

“What it has been from the start.” Woojin gave back. “Get her. Get the mask. Destroy the neuro-transmitter.” 

And then he took off, pulling Minhyun out with him, towards the black tendrils reaching out for them. He knew the others would follow them. 

From there on out it was a mess, and Woojin could not quite follow all of it, too occupied with his own small part. Jinyoung zoomed past him, going straight for the offence. Jaehwan was close behind him, something akin to a war-cry spilling over his lips into the room. 

It was what brought noise back to Woojin’s thoughts. He heard everything as if the volume was turned up over the next few minutes, heard every impact of metal on armour, every yell of encouragement, anger, distress, the hissing of one of Daehwi’s concoctions on the ground, the screeching as Jinyoung turned a sharp corner to avoid one of Shin’s attacks. 

Everything was happening at once, everywhere was noise, yet Shin was in the center of it all, and she was quiet. The silence around her was nearly serene, had it not been for all of the screaming, all of the fire within Woojin’s mind being directed at her. 

He and Minhyun were making their way towards her, or trying to. They were deflecting her attacks where they came, but it didn’t seem like they could actually close in on her, neither could any of the others. None of them came even close to bursting the bubble of silence around her. 

Suddenly, he heard clattering from two sides of the room. A quick check told him that to his left, Jaehwan had managed to freeze a chunk of microbots to the ground after Jinyoung had quite literally sliced them off of the tendril they were coming from. The small black pieces of technology were now out of Shin’s control. On his right, Sungwoon had gotten a similar result by hitting some detached bots with plasma. A plan started forming in Woojin’s head. 

He and Minhyun dodged an attack, and out of the corner of his eyes he could see Daehwi create some sort of protective shield. None of this was going anywhere. 

“Guys, change of plans.” He said, knowing his voice was projected over to the other’s in-ear devices. “Before we can start getting to Shin, we have to get through the bots. We can’t get to her like this. Did you all see what Sungwoon and Jaehwan just did? Try to work together, detach them from the tendrils, it will take Shin a few seconds to rearrange them under her control. That’s when you need to take them out. The plasma and freeze-ray worked, I’m sure you can whip something up that’ll work too, Daehwi.” He got several confirmations of understanding from the others before he added: “And be careful. She doesn’t mind the collateral damage and she won’t mind if you’re part of it, that makes her dangerous.” 

And they set to action. Woojin couldn’t help but think at one point, how impossibly perfect they seemed to work together, how smoothly all of them understood each other, even without being synced up like him and Minhyun were. Whenever someone needed to be at his side, they were. They all had each other’s back. 

With their new plan it seemed ridiculously easy to finally close in on her. In what noise and stress and adrenaline made Woojin feel was not more than ten minutes, Shin seemed at the end of her wits, nearly all of her microbots just useless pieces of debris on the ground. 

Logically, Woojin knew that things like anger burned bright but quick. He knew that adrenaline subsided and so did emotions and usually, what followed was nothing but a hollow echo of them. Yet when he stepped past Sungwoon and Jaehwan now, took the strides over to where Shin stood, it was like all of his emotions were being projected onto a mirror, were being thrown back at him even more intensely. When he stopped in front of Daniel’s murderer, there was a metallic taste in his mouth, and his hands stung where he dug his nails into the insides of them, yet his voice was steady. 

“It’s time you take responsibility for your actions.” He said. He could see her still try to will the microbots, so he added: “It’s over.”

“Do you really think so?” She gave back and her voice was rough from heavy breathing and something else. In any other moment, it would have made him stop and wonder, would have sent a shiver down his spine, but right now he couldn’t focus on anything but the growing spark of anger in his chest as he took another step towards her. He could feel Minhyun’s presence right behind him. 

He motioned for the mask she was wearing. “There’s nothing you can do, Shin. Give us the transmitter.” 

She didn’t move to take off the mask, and she didn’t move to attack. She didn’t even continue to try and gain control back over the destroyed microbots. She stood there in complete silence for a few seconds, and then her shoulders started to shake. 

At first, Woojin thought she was crying, but after a moment it turned into something louder, something that sent a real shiver down his back this time. She was laughing. 

“Oh, that would have been too good, wouldn’t it?” She asked, no one in particular. 

Then, from one second to the next she turned completely still again. 

“Woojin, do you really think that Shin Yumi would be capable of anything like this?” 

And there it was again, the _something else_ in her voice, a sort of gravel, a certain melody. It was not Shin Yumi’s voice, yet Woojin knew it, knew the way it said his name. He had only heard it a few times before, months ago. Yet he knew where to place it after a few seconds, even though his mind was yelling at him that it couldn’t, that it shouldn’t be possible. 

“Kahi.” He said, more a breath than a word. Her shoulders shook again, one, a single laugh huffed out into the stagnant air of the warehouse. 

“You really thought Shin did all of this.” She repeated, unbelieving as well as amused, both emotions she shouldn’t get to have right now, shouldn’t get to have ever again. 

“All of what?” Woojin asked and it was still barely a whisper. “Stealing my microbots? Burning down the school for it?” He took an unsteady breath and spat out: “Killing Daniel?” 

“You don’t know anything.” She shook her head. “You don’t know why--” 

“I don’t _want_ to know why you did it.” Woojin interrupted her, his voice booming through the hall. “I want you to pay for it.” 

 

Kahi had staged the fire, had accepted whatever collateral damage it might leave, had accepted that she killed Daniel, all to steal these robots that Woojin had made. Yet it had been her laugh, that sound full of disdain and dismissiveness, that had turned the spark into a flame, had made Woojin want for her to pay instead of just owning up. She hadn’t cared about what happened to Daniel, why should he care about what happened to her?

He wanted to charge for her, but when he tried, expecting Minhyun to follow him, he felt the robot’s hand wrap around his arm. 

“What are you doing?” He hissed, his eyes still trained on the woman in front of him. She hadn’t moved. She didn’t see him as a threat. 

“My safety protocol prevents me from harming a human being.” Minhyun said, and he was so, so calm that it tore at Woojin. 

“She killed Daniel.” He growled. 

“My safety protocol--” Minhyun began to repeat and Woojin let out a short yell of frustration. With quick movements he turned to Minhyun, pressing the USB hatch. Both, Daniel’s original programming chip, and his own were on display, and without thinking twice, Woojin ripped Daniel’s from the hatch. He could hear it hit the ground somewhere behind him.

“Woojin.” He could hear a voice from behind him. It might have been Sungwoon, or Daehwi, and whoever it was might have been concerned, but Woojin couldn’t find it in him to turn around. He pushed his chip back in and said, his voice grave with the ashes falling in his chest: “Minhyun, get her.” 

A lot of things happened, seemingly at once then. 

Minhyun charged forward, without another second of hesitance or confirmation, his remaining programming allowing him to do nothing more but execute the order to fight. Kahi finally moved starting to realize that while Woojin maybe hadn’t been a threat, the robot charging towards her was, and maybe it would have filled Woojin with some sort of satisfaction, had he been able to feel anything but blinding rage. 

Faintly he registered his friends yelling and starting to move behind him, saw Jinyoung rush past him, towards where Kahi was trying to avoid Minhyun’s attack, saw the others following him suit. It took him another moment to register that they weren’t attacking her as well, they were trying to deflect Minhyun’s attack. 

He wanted to yell out to them, to run and tell them to stop, that she deserved it, to ask if they didn’t want to avenge Daniel too, but he couldn’t, couldn’t even think about it, could only feel the fire inside of him and see the fire that had taken Daniel’s life. Everything happening in front of him only reached him as if through a thick fog. 

Something shrill filtered through and then, suddenly, everything ended as quickly as it had begun. 

Woojin’s eyes focussed back on Daehwi stepping back from Minhyun, Daniel’s pink chip secure back in his hatch, Minhyun standing entirely still where he had tried nearly desperately to get to Kahi before. The others were crowded around where Sungwoon had a tight grip around Kahi’s arms. Jaehwan was standing in front of her, his face as blank as Woojin’s chest felt as he broke the sudden silence: “What? What did you just say?” 

“Daniel is not dead.” Kahi repeated.

It wasn’t as shrill, not nearly as desperate as the first time she said it, yet it reverberated in Woojin’s head as if she had yelled it directly into his face. 

He wanted to ask, wanted to accuse, wanted to say that she was lying, that she was only saying this to hold them off, but he couldn’t do anything more but stand and stare. The absence of the fire within him held him in place just as much as the fire had. 

The silence in the warehouse was deafening, until it wasn’t. Until noise surged back into it with the door flying open, with what seemed like a whole army of uniformed people crowding him, bellowing out orders, telling them to step back, to stand down. A few of them took Sungwoon’s place behind Kahi, held her into place as she still stared at Woojin and he stared back. 

Her face was blank, all fight and superiority that might have been there before bled out of it, yet she wasn’t talking. Woojin knew this. He knew that she wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t answer any questions anyone would ask. She had reached a point of hopelessness that was akin to nothingness. 

It meant that it was nearly a pitiful scene as she was dragged out. 

It also meant that Woojin would never get to ask, to accuse, to find out if what she had said had been the truth or simply a way to buy time. 

He wanted to scream after her but he knew it had no use, and for once he couldn’t come up with any alternative that had. 

***

Seongwoo and Guanlin explained to them later that they had contacted the authorities, in hushed voices as they all huddled together in Jaehwan’s living room. 

Jisung was hurrying from the kitchen back into the room, fussing about all of them, gently forcing them to eat and drink. The conversation drifted off into meaninglessness, into a misplaced sense of normalcy, yet it all happened around Woojin, not with him. 

He couldn’t even dare to think of normalcy even if the shadow of it was right in front of him, not when his mind was too occupied with what-if’s. 

It didn’t seem like the others were thinking about it much. All of them had seemed to have decided on the possibility of a lie. Woojin had heard Jaehwan mention what Kahi said to one of the agents before they had let them go, yet he left out that last statement. None of them mentioned it again, not on the way back, not to Jisung. Woojin thought that he could see traces of the same hopelessness that had overtaken Kahi in their eyes. 

The room drifted off into silence when Woojin came to a conclusion. 

“Kahi had already given up.” He said into the room. He heard the others shift to face him as he kept his eyes trained onto the carpet. 

“She lost her son in that experiment. It’s why she hated Yumi, yet she never had the chance to get back at her, or to try and get Jihoon back. She probably thought she could get that chance with the microbots. We don’t know what her exact plan was, but it had to have something to do with the experiment if that’s where we found her today. But she didn’t only give up when she was taken into custody. She had already done that when we destroyed the bots. That’s when she lost her last hope to follow through with what she was planning. Why would she lie when she had already given up?” 

“She didn’t say it to protect whatever she was planning.” Sungwoon replied, and it was as if he’d been waiting, as if he’d been thinking about the exact same thing. “She said it to protect her life.” 

There was something unspoken there, something that reached around Woojin’s heart with cold fingers and squeezed. In his head the bright pink chip clattered to the floor of the warehouse again. His own voice echoed, too. _”Minhyun, get her.”_

A wave of emotion washed over him then, of regret and guilt and shame. He lowered his head then, as his eyes began to sting. His first sob tore through the silence in the room just as much as it tore through his body. 

“I’m sorry.” Was all he got out because he didn’t have an excuse or an explanation, and he didn’t think he should deserve to be forgiven or listened to. “I’m sorry.” 

In the moment he had thrown Daniel’s chip to the side he had not only betrayed Daniel, he had also betrayed himself. He hadn’t been any better than Kahi then, he had been exactly the same. 

He felt the couch next to him dip, and then Jisung’s arms were around him, consoling and comforting and familiar. He didn’t think he deserved it, but before he could even attempt to protest, Daehwi was on his other side and carded a hand through his hair and he didn’t think he could form the words. 

It took him about ten minutes to regain his composure enough to push them off. When he looked up, Jaehwan was sitting in front of him. 

“I would have done the same.” He said, quietly. “I think most of us would have done the same, but none of it is important. What’s important is that we were there to clean up your mess.” He tries for a lopsided grin, yet something about the situation makes it come out way more sincere than Woojin thought he had been going for. Just as sincere as it was probably meant. “We’re a team, you know?”

It nearly made Woojin burst into tears again, but he held them back, bit his lip and nodded. 

It took another few minutes for everyone to settle again, before Jinyoung quietly asked: “You think she said the truth?” 

Woojin looked at him for a long moment before replying. “I don’t think she lied.” 

“That’s not necessarily the same thing.” Sungwoon stated and Woojin shook his head. 

“It’s not, I just-- I don’t know. Maybe I just want to believe it’s true.” After remembering the look on Kahi’s face, he added: “Even if it was, we won’t find out.” 

Sungwoon looked like he wanted to say more, or like he wanted to protest, but they were interrupted by Minhyun. The robot had spent the evening standing in a corner of the room, helping Jisung to carry glasses sometimes, but otherwise quiet. It nearly seemed like he had been deep in thought as well, trying to process everything that happened. 

“Woojin.” He said. It took Woojin a few moments to look at him. Faintly, he heard plastic clatter to concrete again. When he did, Minhyun held his gaze as if he wanted to make sure Woojin was listening to him. 

“Daniel is here.” 

Any other time, Woojin would have turned away, told him that it couldn’t be true, that he was wrong, that Daniel was gone. He maybe would have checked his programming for any irregularities. 

But now he got out of his seat, walked up to Minhyun and asked: “What do you mean?” 

“I tried to tell you when we were on the rooftop.” Minhyun explained. “But you said that it wasn’t a good time. Perhaps, now is a better time.” 

“Minhyun, what are you talking about?” Woojin asked again, impatience lacing his words. He could feel the others’ eyes on them, could feel everyone’s nerves thrumming through the air. 

“When I scanned the area to find Miss Park Jiyoung, I noted a set of vitals very similar to Daniel’s. Nearly a 100% match. My scanner’s average distance is not high enough to have confirmed it completely, it was too far away.” 

“But--” Woojin started again, his voice breaking before he could get it out. “But, it could have been him?” His word were strained. His nails were digging into the inside of his hand. 

“It was a 96.4% match. Statistically it is very unlikely for someone who is not Daniel to match with that many of his vitals.” 

Woojin sent a look to the rest of the room and found all of them looking back at him. He couldn’t quite keep his hands from shaking anymore. 

“Minhyun, do you think you can find him again?” Jisung asked from the couch. His voice was unsteady, watery. He sounded exactly as Woojin felt. 

“It is likely.” Minhyun allowed. 

Everyone else was still looking at Woojin. He was reminded of what Jaehwan said, that they were a team, and he knew that it was true, in that moment more than ever. 

“Let’s go.” He said. 

***

It was a peculiar atmosphere as they headed off. It was tension but something more, apprehension but heavier, hope but not quite there, not quite daring to be. 

Jisung never left Woojin’s side, not as they got back into the car, not as Minhyun took three tries to detect the vital profile again, not on the tensely quiet way to where Minhyun guided them. 

In big cities, there were places that made even the smallest things seem like something dangerous, something looming, in the worst cases, something that promised failure. Hope was one of these things, and Woojin felt as if he himself was one of these things as they stepped out onto the piers. 

The city’s piers at day were busy and industrial, full of workers and ships and noise. At night they turned into something akin to a dream, something akin to a nightmare. Solid-looking wafts of fog dotted the water as far as they allowed them to see, some made their way on land, as if they were victims of a shipwreck, slowly pulling their way to what seemed like safety, illuminated only by dingy lights. 

Woojin also felt like the victim of a shipwreck. He hadn’t made his way to land yet, not quite there, he could feel the energy leave his body with every step, yet he never stopped. He was scared that the looming feeling, as small as it was, would catch up on him, would turn his hope into something even more dangerous than it already was, would make him turn around, drown. 

“There.” Minhyun said. He was pointing at a door at the end of a small staircase leading down. Woojin probably wouldn’t have noticed it in the day and the usual frenzy of the piers, but right now it stood out to him, stark and as if the metal was emanating a cold glow. 

“Where does it lead?” Sungwoon asked from somewhere behind him. 

“The facilities behind it used to be storage halls for fishermen, but they have been out of use for over a decade now.” Minhyun explained. 

“Sounds like a perfect villain lair.” Jaehwan muttered. It seemed like he had planned to make light of the situation but changed his mind halfway through, a joke never quite becoming one in the way his voice got caught in his throat. 

Woojin stepped forward, surprising himself when his hand _didn’t_ shake as he reached for the door. It clicked open surprisingly quick. 

“She probably didn’t expect people to look for her here.” Daehwi stated. 

“She probably didn’t expect people to have a friendly robotic people-finder on their side.” Jinyoung gave back. 

“I am a personal healthcare companion.” Minhyun corrected him. 

They were still standing in front of the gaping black hole that had opened, none of them daring to step forward. 

“Woojin?” Jisung asked carefully, and that was when he realized they were waiting for him to move first. 

He thought it was only fair to share his doubts with them, when they were so willing to follow him into everything. 

“What if we’re wrong? What if he’s not there?” He asked. His voice felt like the fog surrounding them, seemingly solid but not quite tangible. Something far off. 

“Then we can’t change that.” Jisung replied. He had a hand on Woojin’s shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “But we won’t find out if we don’t at least try.” 

“Even if he’s not in there,” Guanlin cut in. “ _Someone_ is, right?” He turned to Minhyun for confirmation and when the robot nodded, he continued: “Daniel or not, we shouldn’t leave anyone in a scary hole like this.” 

Woojin nodded. The chances of someone else finding whoever was in there were low, if they decided to turn back now. 

Without giving himself another chance to doubt the decision, he walked through the door. 

His eyes took a long moment to start to adjust, and even then he could only vaguely see the start of a corridor in front of him. The walls were slightly damp, slightly green with moss, and the air was already thicker than it had been outside. 

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say nobody has been here since it closed down.” Seongwoo noted from somewhere behind Woojin. “Not very welcoming.” 

“It’s not supposed to be. It’s all for the evil atmosphere.” Jaehwan replied. 

“Do you really think people care about that stuff?” Daehwi asked as the group slowly made their way down the corridor. 

“Since when are you an expert on real life supervillains?” Jaehwan threw back, only a tad defensive. Both of them were silenced by Sungwoon. 

They were slow, way slower than Woojin would have liked yet faster than his nerves seemed to be comfortable with. He hated not knowing what expected them, he hated hoping for what could be and he hated fearing that he could be wrong. 

“Turn left here.” Minhyun pulled him slightly in the right direction by his arm. He kept his hand there, probably because it was the most logic option to guide him through the corridors, and Woojin was thankful for the distraction. 

No matter what they would find at the end of these corridors, he wasn’t alone down here. 

“It’s really useful how Minhyun can locate people like this.” Jinyoung spoke up after a few silent steps echoed through the darkness. “I bet the police would give a fortune for this technology.” 

“A lot of people would. He never really said anything about it, but I saw some of the offers Daniel got, even for the earliest prototypes.” It sounded like Sungwoon was smiling. “He threw all of them away, he really just wanted to help people with this.”

“Woah.” Guanlin mumbled. He was walking at the very back of the group, but the walls threw his echo around and distorted it to the point where he might as well have been walking right next to Woojin. Noises and distance seemed fluid down here and Woojin was once again thankful for the cold hand weighing down on his arm.

Milky blue mixed in with the stuffy black ink around them after the next turn. 

“We are nearly there.” Minhyun informed them, as Woojin’s eyes caught onto the artificial glow at the end of the corridor. 

Minhyun’s hand tightened momentarily, something akin to a reassuring squeeze, then he said: “Your adrenaline levels are heightened.” 

“Yeah.” Woojin gave back under his breath. “I’m scared, I’m fucking terrified.” 

“Please mind your language.” Minhyun’s reply came automatically like Woojin knew it would. He had said it every time someone swore. Then the robot continued: “There is nothing to be scared of.” 

They were only a few steps from the next turn. 

“I don’t know what we’re gonna find here.” Woojin attempted to explain. 

“You are not alone here. There is nothing to be scared of.” 

Despite the fact that Woojin’s all was kicking and screaming to stop for just a second, he let Minhyun pull him along and around the corner. The robot’s words seemed to echo off the walls just like the bright blue light was. 

“Daniel is here.” 

The room in front of them stood in vast contrast to the damp walls behind them. Behind polished glass a hall wider than one would expect underground expanded, all of it lit up by lights so clinically white they had given off the blue illusion they had seen before.

They were pointed at a glass dome in the center of the room, seemingly empty, but Woojin could roughly recognize the machines mounted around it as similar to the ones they had seen on the video recordings. 

“She was trying to recreate the experiment.” Woojin said, more to himself than to the others. 

“Do you think she stole all of this stuff?” Guanlin asked. 

“Well, I don’t think she casually strolled into a hardware store when everyone believed her to be dead.” Jinyoung gave back. 

Their conversation was cut short by Jaehwan. “How do we get in?” 

Minhyun didn’t offer a reply, but he stepped a bit to the side and pressed down on a small keypad none of them had noticed before. Woojin assumed it to be some kind of security measure, and he wasn’t quite sure how Minhyun was breaching it, but they had more important matters to worry about. 

The glass door slid to the side smoothly, silently, in juxtaposition to their steps resounding on the ground as they stepped into the room cautiously. 

“What now?” Jisung asked. “Do we split up, or…?” 

“Minhyun?” Woojin turned to the robot. He looked around as if searching for something for something, then pointed to a second door at the other side of the room. His gaze shifted to the glass dome afterwards, as if he could see something within its vast nothingness, but Woojin had already shifted his attention to the door. 

This was it, this was when the world would either start turning, or grind to a halt all over again. Only a few quick steps were in between Woojin and certainty, he told himself, and only a few steps were between him and peace, closure, he tried to tell himself as well, no matter what he would find behind that door. 

He took the first step. 

“Woojin.” 

Minhyun’s voice nearly didn’t make it through the chaos of his mind, only when the robot reached out a hand and wrapped it around Woojin’s wrist, did he turn back to him. 

“I am detecting signs of life.” Minhyun said.

His heart threatened to beat out of his chest and his thoughts threatened to spill out of his mind, but he still managed to keep his voice carefully even, when he replied: “I know, that’s why we’re here, because Daniel might be--” 

But Minhyun shook his head and lifted his hand to point again, but this time not at the door. 

“From there.” 

The glass dome was still standing, lifeless, imposing and entirely empty, yet Minhyun’s eyes stayed trained on it, flitting around as if he was trying to locate the life-signs he was picking up on, to no avail. 

“Nobody is there.” Woojin said. “Were that the lifesigns you picked up on the whole time? What about-- What about that door?” _What about Daniel?_ he didn’t dare to ask. He didn’t want to know if Minhyun had been wrong the entire time. 

It was as if Minhyun didn’t hear him, or purposefully ignored him, still trying to focus in on whatever he was seeing behind the glass. “I am detecting signs of life.” He repeated. 

Woojin could feel the tension thrumming through his body and he was pretty sure in the next second he would have pulled free of Minhyun, because his words didn’t make any sense and Woojin didn’t want to listen to them any longer, he just wanted to open that door and find Daniel, or not find him, he finally wanted certainty, wanted to know. But that was when Jinyoung stepped to his other side, and repeated what he had noted only minutes before. 

“Kahi was trying to recreate the experiment.” 

When Woojin turned to him, he continued: “What if she succeeded?” 

Woojin wasn’t sure he was following Jinyoung’s train of thought, and he didn’t seem to be the only one. 

“Why would she go to all of these lengths?” Seongwoo spoke up. “Doing all of this secretly must have taken a lot.” 

“Everyone thought she was dead and she had robbed the university.” Jinyoung said. “She had to stay in hiding to finish this. When the initial experiment failed...We saw the videos, we saw what happened--” He started to trail off, lost in trying to make sense of his own thoughts, when Daehwi cut in. 

“Jihoon.” 

The group turned to him, as he walked right up to the main interface. It was a screen, connected to multiple mismatched machines, all of them repurposed for this. Woojin thought he saw one monitor that must have been taken from a hospital. 

Daehwi started up the power on the screen, all while seemingly thinking out loud. 

“Jihoon never made it out when the experiment shut down. She lost her son to it, that must be it. That’s why she did all of this, she must have been trying to get him back.” 

“Back from where?” Jaehwan asked, just as the machines came to life with a loud beep, sounding unreal as it echoed from the walls. 

“Things like teleportation and the research on it aren’t really open to the public.” Jinyoung piped up again. “But in physics we briefly talked about a dissertation by a scientist who’s been working in this field for about 40 years, and it’s apparently up to 80% proven that there is another plane that could potentially be used for teleportation. Everything has to go somewhere, there still has to be a trajectory from point A to point B, even if it seems like that trajectory was skipped to the naked eye.” 

Woojin’s brain was slow to catch up with everything Jinyoung said, but after a few beats, he asked: “You mean, Jihoon didn’t really disappear? He just--” 

“He just got lost on the way.” Daehwi completed for him. “Look at this.” 

The numbers and symbols on the screen seemed impossible to make sense of, some arranged into formulas that Woojin hadn’t even known existed. Sungwoon let out a low whistle and pointed to one section. 

“It’s coordinates, but the variable alters them. That’s not a place anywhere on this planet, or this solar system even.” 

“So Kahi managed to track him down… in the limbo of another dimension?” Jaehwan sounded a peculiar mixture of amazed and confused, something Woojin had heard from him multiple times in the labs. 

“Pretty much.” Daehwi confirmed, his eyes still trained on the screen. 

“I know we just got her arrested for sinister behaviour, but that is the most impressive thing I have ever heard.” 

Woojin couldn’t help but agree with Jaehwan, but none of them got to dwell on it.

“That experiment you’re talking about,” Jisung spoke up. “How long ago was that?” 

“About three months before-- Three months before the fire.” Woojin replied, remembering the videos they found in the warehouse. 

“And the boy is still alive?” 

They all turned to Minhyun at that question, and the robot started to explain: “He is in what you would call a coma. His vitals are unstable and decreasing.” 

“How much longer do you think he has?” Sungwoon chipped in. 

“Impossible to determine. From my calculations, he should be dead.” 

Minhyun’s voice was so sober when he said that, so devoid of any urgency of suggestion, that it took Woojin a second to understand the graveness of his words. 

“We have to help.” 

He could feel the eyes of his friends on him as he stepped next to Daehwi, his eyes trained on the glass dome. “What do you mean, ‘help’?” Daehwi asked. 

“He’s still alive in there. If we can do anything to help, we have to.” 

“Woojin, that is downright insane, you saw what happened back during the experiment--” Sungwoon exclaimed somewhere behind him, but Woojin paid him no mind. 

“It’s functional, right?” He asked Daehwi. 

“F-from what I can see here, yes. But, Woojin, so was the one back at the warehouse, I don’t know if--” 

“We have to try.” Woojin interrupted him. “Daniel would have wanted us to try.” 

In this moment, he didn’t care about the initial reason they came here for. He didn’t care about the fact that Minhyun might have been mistaken all along, that it might not even have been Daniel’s vitals the robot sensed, but Jihoon’s. distorted and weak through the teleporter. He didn’t care about Kahi and about anything that happened earlier that day.

All he cared about in this moment was the determination in Daniel’s eyes as he ran back into a burning building, the unwavering conviction to do the right thing, to help where he could. 

“I’m going in alone.” He told the rest of them, but then he hesitated. “Minhyun, do you think you can locate these coordinates or his vital signs in there?” 

“That has never been tested before.” Minhyun stated. 

Woojin nodded. “Alright, then I’ll try to do it alone.” 

“No.” Was all he got back from the robot, when he actually hadn’t expected a reply at all. 

“No?” He repeated, halting in his movement towards the dome. 

“He’s right.” Jisung immediately jumped in. “You shouldn’t do this, Woojin, we have no idea--” 

“I can not let you go in alone.” Minhyun interrupted him. 

Woojin elected to do the same. “Why not?” 

“I am your personal healthcare companion.” Minhyun replied, matter-of-factly. 

“I don’t think you can care much for me in there.” 

“No one can!” Jisung said again, and Woojin could see him preparing to launch into another try to hold him back and the desperation in his eyes so he said to him, as calmly as possible: 

“No one could look out for Daniel in the fire either, and he still took the risk.” 

He knew what Jisung was feeling right now, knew the fear of going through the same hollow nothingness they both had experienced before. He hated reminding his friend of exactly that, hated bringing up Daniel, but it felt infinitely significant in this very moment, to remember. Remember what Daniel would have wanted and what he stood for, and what he would have done in this moment. 

Faintly, Minhyun’s words from earlier echoed in Woojin’s memory. 

_”Daniel is here.”_

Woojin didn’t know if it was the truth, but he agreed in this moment. 

Jisung deflated, his next words not uttered with fight, but with the hopelessness of someone who had lost, someone who was scared to lose again. “And look where that landed him.”

“Jihoon is in there, Jisung, and he is alive.” Woojin repeated, and his voice simmered down to nothing more than a whisper with the conviction it held. “He has a family out here, he has friends, and a future, but he will never even get the chance to live it, if we don’t do something. We have to try.” 

Jisung said nothing for a moment, his eyes trained carefully on the ground as if the damp, cold stone held answers that he couldn’t seem to find himself. When he looked back up, tears were glittering in the corners of his eyes. 

“Daniel would be so proud of you.” He choked out. “ _I_ am so proud of you.” 

It felt weird when Jisung hugged him, and Woojin told himself it wasn’t because this was a goodbye. He sent another look Minhyun’s way, the android standing by the teleporter, as calm as he always was, and knew it wasn’t goodbye, they’d be back in no time. 

Teleportation was everything and nothing like Woojin had imagined it. It was weird to think that just with a few presses of Daehwi’s fingers, he was transported somewhere else, somewhere where no human should be, yet when the nausea coiling up in his stomach subsided and he opened his eyes back up, it felt infinitely more real than an alternate dimension should. 

At first Woojin thought everything around him was plunged into darkness, Minhyun the only thing he could see clearly, floating in the nothingness next to him, but after a few moments, as if his eyes just had to get used to it, he could make out cloud-like wafts around him. They were not quite light, not quite anything else, not quite something Woojin had the necessary vocabulary for, and they were everywhere, seemingly stretching into eternity. 

Woojin had always felt small in even just the city he lived in, and now he was confronted with nothingness stretching on forever around him, yet he couldn’t find it within himself to care. 

“Minhyun, is it working?” He asked, surprised when his voice didn’t lose itself, didn’t echo like it usually would. 

“It is not working like usual.” Minhyun answered, slowly like he was still in the process of testing it. “But I am locating something.” Minhyun’s head whipped to the side once, quickly, then he was back to looking at Woojin. He didn’t explain, just continued: “It is the vitals from before.” 

“Is it far from here?” 

Daehwi had tried to calibrate the teleportation as close as possible to the coordinates on the screen, but there was no telling if it worked. He’d told Woojin before they went in, that the technology was designed to pick up on the teleporter, enabling his friends back in Kahi’s lab to bring them back. But there was no telling if that would work either. 

It was risk upon risk Woojin was taking here, he knew that and he was prepared for the possible consequences. If he was honest, he had expected to doubt it all once he and Minhyun were alone, but as they made their way through the midnight-clouds, towards the life they were attempting to safe, he still felt as sure as he had when he stepped onto the platform. 

More and more clouds materialized around them as they made their way forward, and then, suddenly, there was something reflecting the not-light instead of emitting it, something tangible, with a heartbeat. 

The boy looked like he was sleeping, fitting right in with the dreamlike landscape around them. His eyes were closed, if Woojin looked closely he could see the tiniest icecicles on them as well as on the folds of the spacesuit-like uniform he was wearing. He hadn’t even realized how cold it was here. 

“Park Jihoon.” Minhyun said when they reached him. Woojin thought his voice sounded weird, and attributed it to the missing echo from before. “Sixteen years old, comatose, situation bordering critical, oxygen levels--” 

“That’s not important right now.” Woojin interrupted him. “We need to get him and us out of here, then we can start talking medical.” 

He expected Minhyun to agree silently and get to work with helping him steering Jihoon closer to their original coordinates so it would be easier for Daehwi to bring them back. He maybe expected another medical comment despite Woojin telling him to stop. The android tended to be downright petty like that. 

What he hadn’t expected was: “Oxy- Oxygen. Oxygen l-levels lo- Ox- Oxygen.” 

Woojin stopped dead in his tracks, one arm already wrapped around Jihoon’s entirely still body. 

“Minhyun?” 

“P-park J- Oxygen-- comatose, situation b-bo--” 

“ _Minhyun_ , what is going on?!” 

“The environment is not- environment not suited.” Minhyun’s voice didn’t sound calm and monotone for once. It sounded like he had to force the words out, distorted. Woojin couldn’t think of another word for it, Minhyun sounded panicked. “Hardware not-- compatible.” 

“What do you mean the hardware is not compatible? With this environment?” 

“I ex- I expected this. From the calculations-- On the screen.” 

Woojin’s hand was gripping on to the fabric of Jihoon’s uniform way to tight, but he didn’t even feel the circulation being cut off from his fingers. 

“What does that mean?” 

“Will not-- Not suited. Not compatible. Will not-- Will not make it out.” 

Woojin could feel how cold it was now. “Yes, you will.” He rasped out. Why was it so hard to keep his voice steady? “You’ll make it out, and I will, and we’ll take Jihoon back with us, and we’ll--” 

As he spoke, he could see Minhyun’s head whip to the side again, this time not stopping immediately. He wasn’t shaking his head, rather it was the hardware of his machinery rejecting the very world they were in. Or maybe it was the other way around. Minhyun’s hand all but cramped up, soft metallic grating that didn’t echo into the nothingness of the hell around them. 

Woojin knew that Minhyun was right. He wouldn’t make it out. 

“You knew.” He said quietly. Something was cold on his cheek, it might have been one of the clouds coming too close, it might have been a tear. “You knew, and you still went in with me. Why?” 

“You would--would n-not.” A short pause, more metallic grating. Something that sounded like a radio channel fading out. The noise carried along with Minhyun’s voice then, but the words came out clearer than before: “You would not have been able to locate Jihoon alone.” 

Woojin didn’t think he could reply anything to that for a long moment. He stared at Minhyun, and Minhyun blinked back. Woojin held his gaze right up until the blinking went out of sync, more quiet noise in the dark, and one of Minhyun’s eyes, the one encased by armour Woojin had built, went entirely black, like a screen zapping out. 

Woojin lowered his eyes, stared at the thin layer of ice on Jihoon’s shoulder. They didn’t have time. 

“C-can…” A sob threatened to force itself out with the words and Woojin swallowed it down. “Can we try anything, is there anything we can do?” 

“You need to get back to the others.” Minhyun replied. It wasn’t an answer to Woojin’s question, not one he wanted to hear. 

“Please, Minhyun.” He tried again. “We have to be able to do _something_ , I can’t lose you too…” He trailed off, not able to control his voice much longer. 

“I am here.” Minhyun said.

Then, he moved, as best as he could, towards where Woojin was still holding onto Jihoon’s body, and slowly started pushing both of them closer to their original coordinates. 

Woojin hoped, then. He hoped that Minhyun had somehow found a possibility in the calculations, some sort of override, anything that would let him leave this place before it consumed him. He hoped right until they had reached the closest they could get to where they arrived, and Minhyun turned to him, one eye pitch black still, the other as it has always been, nearly human, just that little bit off.

His voice was more distorted now than it had been before and Woojin had to strain his ears to catch everything. 

“I can deactivate when you say: I am satisfied with my care.” 

Woojin had given up trying to force the sobs down, and he had given up pleading. 

Despite the tears running down his cheeks and the trembling of his hands, Woojin had to laugh at the irony of it all. 

He had lost Daniel and had promptly latched onto a non-sentient robotic nurse Daniel had built and now he was losing that too. He could already see Jisung buy every single self-help book on attachment issues in existence. 

“The care you gave me was satisfactory.” Woojin choked out. 

Minhyun stayed silent, safe for the ongoing static, still holding onto Jihoon’s uniform. Then, Woojin made out: “Please stop bullying the robot.” 

Another beat of silence, before Minhyun repeated: “I can deactivate if you say: I am satisfied with my care.” 

Woojin closed his eyes for a second. “Thank you for everything.” He breathed out. Then: “I am satisfied with my care.” 

Minhyun nodded, or maybe it was another malfunction of his hardware, and let go of Jihoon’s uniform. 

Woojin thought he saw something pink flash, but he was distracted by Minhyun’s eyes closing, his features going slack. 

He felt the pull of the teleportation in his gut, violently, but he didn’t pay it any mind this time. 

Again, he kept his eyes closed until his body collided with the ground. He heard dull sounds, voices, his friends exclaiming, and it echoed off the glass walls, like it should. 

“They’re back!” He heard Guanlin cheer. 

“Thank god.” He heard Jisung. 

“We have to hurry up and get Jihoon stabilized. The medics should get here any second.” Sungwoon said. 

“Wait, where’s Minhyun?” Jaehwan asked. 

The tears on Woojin’s face had dried, or maybe they had frozen, but he could see his friends clearly as he looked up. “He didn’t make it out.” He said. It was no explanation, not even close to one, but he would tell them another time. Now they had other worries. 

As Sungwoon and Jisung helped Woojin carry Jihoon out of the glass dome and settle him on the ground, he heard footsteps hurrying along the corridor they had come from. Soon after, Seongwoo was rounding the corner, with him a team of paramedics.

Everything around Woojin was busy as he was sitting still on the floor. He was shivering slightly, but he wasn’t present enough to do anything about it, or to do anything at all.

He nearly didn’t notice Jisung crouching down in front of him. 

“They stabilized Jihoon as far as they could and will take him to the hospital any second.” 

Woojin nodded. 

There was more in Jisung’s voice than just the desire to inform Woojin about the situation he was too out of it to grasp himself, but Woojin didn’t pry, couldn’t. 

“What about that door?” Jisung asked suddenly. 

“What about it?” Woojin repeated weakly. 

“Minhyun said there was something behind it. Someone.” 

Woojin turned to the door in question. It was still there, still cold and still closed. Minhyun could have been wrong. It could’ve been just Jihoon he had been picking up on. 

_”Daniel is here.”_ It echoed in his head, no static, no metal grating, just calm monotony. A fact. 

Woojin got to his feet and walked towards the door.

His heart hammered against his ribs as he started making his way towards the metal even though he tried to make it calm down. He hated the sticky feeling of hope seeping back into his every bone, hated that he apparently _still_ hadn’t learned, even after everything that happened.

Right before the door, his hand already halfway to the handle, he halted in his movements. 

He could feel them all right behind him, knew his friends were watching, their own sparks of hope slowly coming back to life across the room. He nearly felt like he might be alright when Jisung put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. 

The handle was cold under his fingers. The door opened. 

 

 **{live with me forever now}**  
Big cities actually didn’t seem big at all if you didn’t feel small. You felt small when you were alone. 

Woojin wasn’t alone, and when he walked into the university’s laboratories that morning, it was only a small part of the city, but it meant the world. 

“Woojin!” Jinyoung immediately called, hurrying over and pulling him towards the wheels currently mounted up on his station. “Remember that run-in we had with the bot-fighting clique down 3rd street? I nearly lost them because I couldn’t turn the corner properly, so I worked on it a bit and--” 

“Didn’t you have an exam this week?” Woojin interrupted him. Jinyoung brushed him off. It was only slightly hypocritical. He and Jinyoung tended to put school second to “superhero stuff” just as much as each other.

“Priorities.” Jinyoung shrugged.

“He would have failed if it wasn’t for me.” Another voice joined in. Daehwi casually leaned against his desk a few steps away. “I made him a pop-quiz.” He informed Woojin, throwing a blueberry up and barely catching it with his mouth. “I’m a genius, I don’t know what he would have done without me.” 

Woojin walked over and stole a handful of blueberries out of the bag Daehwi was holding, only getting a light hit in the shoulder for it, then made his way over to the couch where Jaehwan was lounging, nearly upside down, reading a comic book. 

“Big day today.” He noted, when Woojin sat down to eat his blueberries. “Jihoon is getting out of the hospital, and everything.” 

Woojin nodded. Over the past months he and his friends had spent a considerable amount of time in the hospital, none of them really able to accept that Jihoon was ultimately a stranger to them after they pulled his barely alive body out of other-dimensional limbo. 

In the process of it, Jihoon had ceased to be a stranger, and Daehwi had gotten Jihoon to promise him that he’d visit them for once, as soon as he recovered fully. 

“A lot changed since he was here last, I’m sure he’s going to be _amazed_.” Jaehwan theorized. 

“I’m sure it hasn’t changed _that_ much. You’re all still a mess.” 

“True, but now you’re here.” Jaehwan grinned. “And you’re also a mess.” 

“I take offense in that, especially when it comes from _you_.” Woojin sniffed, but he knew Jaehwan was right. 

“Don’t you have anything to do? I’m very busy here.” Jaehwan said. When he tried to hold his comic book up for demonstration, he nearly lost balance and had to scramble to not fall headfirst to the floor. “This is your fault.” He told Woojin with narrowed eyes. 

Woojin replied with a grin, but before he could give anything back the doors to the lab opened and a small heap of different tool-boxes walked in. 

“A little help.” A voice came from behind the tool-boxes. “I can’t see.” 

Woojin bound over and took a few boxes from Sungwoon. The older huffed: “I ran into three walls on the way here.” 

“Why didn’t you just use a cart?” Woojin asked, setting the boxes down on Sungwoon’s desk. “And what do you even need all this for?” 

“Carts are for losers. And I’m not sure yet, but I’m sure I’m gonna need this stuff for something.” 

It didn’t have any use to question Sungwoon about this, Woojin knew, so he just shrugged and left him to his devices. 

He guessed he had procrastinated enough, and finally went over to the door by Daehwi’s area. 

He’d run into a series of really complicated mechanisms last week, and try as he might he had not yet been able to get them right. He’d dreaded getting back to work on them all week, spending most of his classes trying to figure out the right composition of them in the margins of his notebooks, but he’d only made minimal progress. Still, it had to be done. He had a goal to work towards here. 

He knocked on the door shortly, more a habit then courtesy of good manners, and stepped in. 

Stepping into the room still sent a small pang to his heart every time, even though a lot had changed here over the past months. In the center of the room, he had set up whatever tools were necessary only a week after he had officially enrolled into university, and he never got around to putting everything to the side, so it had stayed there. They got used to working around it. 

It being in the center of the room though, meant that it was the first thing you saw as soon as you entered: A work in progress, a half finished humanoid robot, still too rudimentary to not be slightly frightening, but already so close to the original that Woojin looked at it and was reminded of everything that had happened. 

“Good morning, Minhyun.” He greeted, out of habit. 

“Oh, the inactive robot gets a greeting, but I’m getting ignored?” 

Woojin turned to the corner of the room with a wide, entirely sarcastic smile. “Good morning, traitor who ate the last of my cereal this morning!” He chirped. 

“That wasn’t me, that was Jisung!”

Woojin had to keep himself from walking over and smushing the last few blueberries he had in his hand into Daniel’s face, especially because Daniel was grinning like he always did when he was lying. He resorted to narrowing his eyes at him and angrily chewing his berries. 

“Oh c’mon.” Daniel laughed. “You know what Jisung would say!” 

Woojin rolled his eyes. “ _Be glad Daniel is even here to eat your cereal._.” He imitated. “I know. He did say that. I still want new cereal.” 

“Aye, aye Captain.” Daniel saluted, before turning back to his desk. 

“What are you working on?” Woojin asked, slowly walking over. A few more minutes of not working on his robotics-dilemma wouldn’t hurt. 

“Those mechanisms for Minhyun’s speech pattern.” Daniel replied absentmindedly, leaned in close to the parts on the desk. 

“That…” Woojin started but trailed off. That was precisely what he had dreaded to work on. 

“Yeah, yeah, I know ,that’s your job, I’m supposed to be coding, but they were laying around here since last week and I had an idea last night, and--” 

“Is that what you were doing up until 3AM?!” Woojin interrupted him. 

“...Possibly.” 

Woojin blinked at him for a moment in disbelief, then shook his head, but not without a small smile. “You’re impossible. Thanks.” 

Daniel threw him a wide not even slightly sheepish smile, then went back to work. 

It had been months, but Woojin still found himself stopping sometimes, and thinking about how truly impossible this all seemed. He had believed Daniel to be dead, he had panicked that all the hope he’d put into Minhyun’s words back then had been misplaced, that the robot had been wrong. He had lost Minhyun before he had even known he’d been right, before they’d found Daniel where Kahi had held him a secret hostage. 

And now Daniel was back with him, healthy, alive, eating Woojin’s cereal, sharing his lab space with Woojin so they could rebuild Minhyun entirely from scratch and it seemed impossible. 

They still had a long way to go with the rebuild. Things like the speech-mechanisms were only small bumps in the road considering that Daniel had to re-do every small bit of coding, something that had taken him years the first time around. 

Sometimes he thought it wasn’t worth it, and they should focus on other things. Daniel had nearly died, he should be out here having fun and going out in his free-time not being holed up in a lab and in front of a computer-- 

“What are you brooding about?” Daniel pulled him out of his thoughts. 

“The usual.” Woojin sighed. They’d had this conversation before. 

“Well, you know I’ll say the usual.” 

Woojin knew. Daniel told him that the whole point of ever starting to work on Minhyun had been that he wanted to help people, and that hadn’t changed even after a near-death experience. 

Still, Woojin felt like it was unfair. 

He was just about to say precisely that, starting a discussion back up that they’d had multiple times, when a soft knock on the door interrupted them. 

“Oh, wow, it’s so messy in here.” Jihoon said in amazement when he opened the door.

“Woojin’s fault.” Daniel threw in from the desk. 

“Not true.” Woojin threw back. 

“Doesn’t matter.” Jihoon decided. “Is that him?” 

It was still confusing for Woojin to think about how Jihoon and Minhyun bad basically just missed each other. “Out of order” precisely then when the other wasn’t. 

He had spent a lot of time at the hospital complaining to Jihoon about complications with the rebuild, mainly about the school board and the recurring problem that they didn’t see why it was necessary to fund something again that they had already funded once before. Woojin and Daniel had taken a lot of trips to principal Kwon’s office. 

Woojin motioned for Jihoon to come closer to the android-in-progress and pointed out various parts they were currently working on, explained where they planned to go with them and what they hoped to develop them to. 

“This is amazing. The last time I was here Daniel was still working on the initial coding.” Jihoon told him when he was done. 

“History repeats itself.” Daniel called gravely from his desk. 

“Yeah, just last time neither of us had nearly died.” Was Jihoon’s chipper reply. “Oh! Speaking of!” 

Woojin looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Speaking of death?” 

“Yeah, kinda.” Jihoon waved a hand dismissively while searching through his bag with the other. “When they let me leave, the hospital gave me my ‘personal belongings’ I apparently had with me when I was brought there. Which seemed weird to me, I only really had the suit and that technically belonged to the government. Ah-ha!” 

Triumphantly he pulled something out of his bag. “But apparently, they found this in the suit’s pocket. I really don’t know how it got there but, Daniel, it had your name on it, so I’d thought I’d show you.” 

Im his hand he held up a bright pink coding chip. _Daniel K_ was written on it in sharpie, and beneath it a smiley face. 

_”This is what makes him Minhyun.”_

_”He’s going to help a lot of people.”_  
_”I am here.”_

 

**The End**

**Author's Note:**

> i spent about 8 months writing on this, so it feels really weird to release her out in the open like this... i hope she lived up to expectations! 
> 
> shannon, pls don't be mad at me for not telling you about daniel surviving, i kinda wanted to see your live reaction that i hadn't killed him off after all <3 
> 
> for questions etc you can find me & my cc link on [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/lilaliacs)


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